Examining Factorial Validity on Bullying in Malaysian Secondary School Context

Abstract

Bullying is a negative behavior toward an individual or a group of individuals that is considered weak. The Ministry of Education Malaysia says that the types of bullying that is common in Malaysian schools are physical, verbal, anti-social and cyber bullying. Accordingly, this study aims to examine factorial validity on bullying in Malaysian secondary school context. This quantitative approach with cross sectional survey method study was conducted in 3 secondary schools with 140 students randomly selected. 12 sets of questionnaires from previous researchers were transformed into a set of questionnaire to measure the domain of bullying by category. The data analysis of this study involves descriptive statistics analysis and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The result showed that 4 factors of bullying which explained 68% of variance. The four types of bullying are (i) physical bullying explained by 4 items, (ii) verbal bullying reflected by 4 items, (iii) anti-social explained by 4 items and (iv) cyber bullying explained by 3 items. The results also revealed that there was a difference between physical and verbal bullying and cyber bullying based on gender (p <0.05), there was no difference between anti-social bullying by gender (p> 0.05), there was no difference between anti-social bullying and no differences between physical (p <0.05), verbal and cyber bullying by age (p> 0.05).