Research Paper on Cyber-Bullying Among College Students

Introduction

Over the years after the introduction of technology, cyber-bullying has been on the rise, and it is a matter that should be discussed especially among young people. Cyber bullying refers to the use of electronic communication or platform to bully a person by sending intimidating messages or pictures. It can happen in various places internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, emails, and also via text messages. The purpose of this research is to figure out to what extent college students would favor education on cyber-bullying. Since it has become a trend especially for college students to experience cyber-bullying, they have decided to make it more public and educate others who have no exposure to this form of bullying, to get to know what measures they should take to make the matter known to prevent more cases from happening in future.

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Research Objective

This project will address the negative impacts of cyber-bullying on students and the actions that college students need to take to debar more cases from happening. During the study, I found out that cyber-bullying causes decline of academic performance and this further leads to increased school dropout cases. Victims of this sort of bullying become at risk of experiencing a series of depression that may lead to addictions of drugs or alcohol. The most extreme impact of cyberbullying is suicide. Most students who are bullied always end up taking away their lives. There are several steps that the abused can take to help in curbing the act, which includes; keeping the evidence that can be acquired as this can be a good aid to the law enforcers who will need a record of events. The second step is getting to talk about it to a trusted person to help a victim gain confidence, another action that can be taken is to go private on their various social media accounts to give room for the bullies to back off since they will not be able to access any of your information and can be accompanied by blocking the bullies. The final and most important move to take is to report the bullies to the law enforcers or the school's security or even address the issue to site administrators.

Target Audience and Research Methodology

The target audience of this research is the college students in institutions of higher learning at large. The research may interest law enforcers too who may be working on such cases. The method that I would use to conduct this project is by use of questionnaires and face to face interviews of the students, their administration teams and their parents too.

Intended Outcomes

The intended outcome of the analysis will be to determine the degree to which the college students would favor education on cyberbullying, which will be in means such as; creating awareness among themselves, forming clubs that would educate on cyberbullying, holding peaceful demonstrations against the act, and they could as well establish platforms to shame these bullies. The other intended outcome of this research would be to ensure that the information I gather would be spread across different colleges globally and further awareness of cyber bullying would be made.

Survey Results

A total of 150 students participated in the student's perspective of the research. Comparatively, 40 percent of them have been victims of cyberbullying in one way or the other. Correspondingly, female students were more likely to experience cyber bullying as compared to their male counterpart. I gathered that the common causes of cyber bullying were due to the lenient school policies that had been set.In conclusion, cyber bullying can be pernicious to the victim's mental and physical health as well. A study that was conducted by the American Counseling Foundation, found that around 22 percent of college students revealed being bullied online. These numbers can change if only more actions can be taken to stop the erroneous deed.