2016 Annual Conference

The proliferation of electronic technology has provided a new forum for bullies to extend the amount of damage they cause and the number of victims they create. The purpose of the pilot study was to examine cyberbullying in higher education to reveal its characteristics, prevalence, and impact via survey research.

This session focuses on cyberbullying among undergraduate and graduate students in higher education. So, the primary target audience for this session should be educators, researchers, adult learners, graduate students, and administrators in higher education, human resource professionals, and others who are pursuing social justice and equality in their field. In addition, this session would benefit policy makers, scholars in policy studies, online and distance educators, and scholars in cyber security by helping them gain a better understanding of characteristics of cyberbullying in higher education.

Cyberbullying is a growing problem. Much of the current research on cyberbullying focuses primarily on K-12 schools (Olweus 2003; Wang, Iannotti, & Lux, 2012; Wang et al., 2009) while research on cyberbullying in higher education is more limited (MacDonald & Roberts-Pittman, 2010; Walker et al, 2011). This proposed presentation would contribute to the knowledge base and to the practice of higher education and ultimately benefit the community and society at large. Since cyberbullying has been addressed most of the time in K-12 schools, cyberbullying in higher education is still relatively unexplored and this void in research on cyberbullying in higher education would be partially filled by an empirical investigation of the characteristics, prevalence, and impact of cyberbullying in higher education.
In addition to the contribution to the literature on cyberbullying, the data from this proposed research would inform higher education administrators and public safety officials regarding the characteristics, prevalence, and impact of cyberbullying so that they can develop policies and procedures that may deter cyberbullying in higher education.