Cyberbullying is a form of bullying that is rapidly on the increase. Cyberbullying continues to affect students today. Although studies on cyberbullying and school pupils have been done, a few studies mainly focus on how it affects the category of female students as well as their academic achievements. In previous studies, there have been limited theory to support and explain the severity of this phenomenon towards the female gender as several studies record a higher number in female victims than male victims. Therefore, this research further investigates the aspects of cyberbullying and female victimization. This study focuses on cyberbullying in a South African university. This research also highlights some factors that lead to female victimization. With the use of literature on cyberbullying and victimization, the researcher formulated a model to guide this research. This model was formulated on the assumption that a cyber-victim's academic performance may be determined by how they would have been greatly affected by being bullied. However, the extent to which a victim is affected by cyberbullying was determined by three factors, that is their age, gender and self-control. The factors mentioned were identified through a literature review. The proposed model was tested using a survey involving 262 female university students from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The collected data was captured on excel and analyzed through the use of Statistica. The findings also revealed that the learners were frequent users of social media and digital devices which could have been the leading cause of them being vulnerable to cyberbullying. Analysis also showed that self-control had a significant influence on how affected learners responded to cyberbullying, whilst age had no significant influence on how learners responded to being bullied. How individuals responded to being bullied had an influence on their academic performance as those who responded negatively to cyberbullying produced poor academic results as compared to those who were not negatively affected. Given that, learning institute authorities can use knowledge obtained in this study to intervene where possible.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/37621 |
| Date | 29 March 2023 |
| Creators | Mataga, Vimbayi Theresa |
| Contributors | Kyobe, Michael |
| Publisher | Faculty of Commerce, Department of Information Systems |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MCom |
| Format | application/pdf |
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