Bullying is commonly characterized as being an aggressive behavior that is carried out by two or more people to an individual. However, through the years and with the expanding growth of technology, the concept of bullying has extended into the technological dimensions and is now labelled as cyberbullying. The definition of cyberbullying is similar to bullying in the sense that it is an aggressive behavior carried out by a group of people with the intention of harming another individual through electronic gadgets such as emails, mobile phones, social media websites as well as chat rooms and instant messaging. The difference between traditional bullying and cyberbullying is that, cyberbullying does not require a face-to-face interaction. According …show more content…
For the victims, they will experiences a lack of acceptance in their group of friends, which will results in loneliness and social withdrawal. Therefore, when someone is withdrawn from their peers, they eventually will develop depression. According to a study, people who are cyberbullied mostly already experienced traditional bullying. Cyberbullying interferes with the person’s well-being because it damages their self-esteem and their academic performances. Victims of cyberbullying reported feeling unsafe when they are at school and even at home. Therefore, this research comes to address the concerns of the participant’s experience with cyberbullying and how it affects a person’s behavior and emotional …show more content…
Due to the implications and consequences of cyberbullying, it should be considered as a widespread for mental and public health issue to increase the awareness about the effects of cyberbullying. In this study, the level of depression among people is the state of excessive sadness or hopelessness that is being measured using the Beck Depression Inventory. The construct definition for this research is the level of depression among people measured using a 21-item questionnaires and each of the answers are scored on a scale value from 0 to 3 which is then combined with all other answers to calculate the sum of scores, and when the score is 0-13 the patient will have minimal depression while scores of 26-63 the patients will have severe depression. This research is aimed to further explore the relationship between cyberbullying and the level of depression among people. Therefore, the hypothesis for this research is students who have any involvement with cyberbullying have a higher chance of having depressive symptoms. Besides that, this research also predicts that individuals that have experience cyberbullying has a higher chance of having depressive symptoms than individuals that does not experience cyberbullying. The independent variable in this study reflects the participant’s experience with cyberbullying. This is because participants who are victims