The Relationship between Cyberbullying and Depression Among College Students

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between cyberbullying and depression among college students. Like real life bullying, cyberbullying leaves severe marks on victims’ psyche, the most important of which is depression. Therefore, this study examined the effect of cyberbullying on college students’ depression. One thousand Jordanian students from Tafila Technical University participated in the study. They represented all 12 Jordanian governorates and had a balanced representation of males (45.4%) and females (54.6%), and science (49.6%) and non-sciences college students (50.4%). Findings showed that cyberbullying exposed 26% of the students to violence and 9% percent of participants knew cyberbullying victims on and off-campus. A little over a third of the sample (37%) reported depression, 33% had a death wish, while a higher percentage (45%) had no interest in life. Females reported a slightly higher tendency towards depression than males of (19% vs. 18% respectively), but showed higher levels of no interest in life (25% vs. 20%), and death wish (18% vs. 14.8%). Further, cyberbullying correlated significantly with college students’ depression (.010) and low self-control (LSC) (.023) but most importantly, cyberbullying had a significant effect on depression (F = 9.538, α = 0.002). There was a significant effect of cyberbullying, LSC, fear, anger, gender, college type, and father’s work status on depression (F = 901.401, α = 0.000). Their combined effect explained 86% of the variance of the depression variable.