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The Disconnection Between Social Media Usage and Cyberbullying

With increased time spent on social media among undergraduate students, cyberbullying becomes a rising concern. Platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat create more opportunities for this age group to fall victim to cyberbullying. We explored the relationship of increased social media usage and cyberbullying experiences. We hypothesized that higher durations time on social media platforms would increase instances of cyberbullying among undergraduate students. A survey was distributed to undergraduate participants asking about their average social media usage and experiences with cyberbullying. Responses were analyzed using multiple One-Way-ANOVA’s to determine the relationship between social media usage and cyberbullying experiences. Results suggested no statistical significance between the variables, leaving us to refute our original hypothesis. Some methodology errors surfaced, which may have tainted the results leaving data that was unable to be analyzed by the One-Way-ANOVA. Due to wording errors in survey questions and a lack of variation in responses some data was unable to be analyzed by a One-Way-ANOVA. Future direction may lead towards redistributing the study to a larger participant pool after re-wording some of the questions, in hopes to drawing our original conclusion stated in the hypothesis. If the relationship between social media usage and cyberbullying was found to be significant, undergraduate students may be able to make changes to their social media tendencies to decrease instances of cyberbullying.

The Disconnection Between Social Media Usage and Cyberbullying
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