Internet Addiction and its Relationship to Bullying Behavior among Middle-School Students

Abstract

The current research aims at recognizing the level of internet addiction and the bullying behavior among middle-school students. Furthermore, Theaim of this paper is to identify the significance of differences on the basis of gender variable (male-female) for the above mentioned variables. To achieve the research objectives, the researcher built an internet addiction scale based on (Grohol, 1999) Grohol's Model of Pathological Internet Use. Moreover the researcher adopted Hameed’s scale (2012) for bullying behavior of middle-school students. The researcher has verified the psychometric properties by eliciting the face validity, and reliability of both scales along with the construct validity of Internet addiction scale. The scale consisted of (21) items. The two scales were then applied on the basic research sample of (400) male and female students, who were randomly selected from Diyala province. After that, data were analyzed and statistically processed by using the following statistical means: T- test for one sample, T- tests for two samples, and Pearson correlation coefficient. The researcher reached the following results:-middle-school students suffer from internet addiction, and( 7%) of those students use the internet for more than four hours per day. Moreover, middle-school students have a bullying behavior. Additionally, there is a statistically significant difference between males and females in both internet addiction and bullying behavior and was in favor of males. Finally, this paper found that there is a low direct correlation between internet. addiction and bullying behavior