Internet Usage Habits and Cyberbullying Related Opinions of Secondary School Students

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the internet usage habits of secondary school students and their awareness of cyberbullying in terms of different variables. Of the probabilistic sampling methods, research sampling identified by stratified sampling method has been formed by 559 students from two branches (56 branches in total) selected with simple random sampling method (For example; 5/A and 5/C) at each grade level (5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades) from 7 schools in Merzifon. Data in the research have been obtained by the form related to the personal information and 'Cyberbullying Scale'. Due to the absence of normal distribution of data, the frequency tables in the analysis of data, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests were used. According to the results of the research, it has been detected that the cyberbullying related awareness of the secondary school students is low (x=20.24 out of 42); there is no significant difference in terms of gender, having personal computer and mobile phone and there are some significant differences in terms of the variables such as the type of school and class level. While the internet use purposes of the students is mostly making research and doing homework, it is seen that using social network such as Facebook is common among the students despite being illegal due to their ages. KEYWORDS Cyberbullying, Internet Usage, Secondary School Students Language: en