Scale of Coping Strategies with Cyberbullying for Teachers: validity and reliability study

Abstract

Objective: Violence in cyberspace as the use of information and communication tools outside of its purpose is called cyber bullying. Cyber victimization, which is common in middle school and high school years, can cause academic, social, psychological and physiological problems in adolescents. Adult support is crucial in coping with cyberbullying. Especially teachers can have an important role to coping. The coping strategies that will be used by the teachers will be effective in preventing and reducing cyberbullying. This scale was developed to determine the strategies of coping with the cyberbullying faced by teacher's students. Methods: Since the research was a scale development study, the quantitative survey model was used. The main study was conducted on 328 teachers. Two hundred and six participants were female (62,8%), 122 were male (37,2%). Results: The item pool of the scale was created by examining the related literature and similar measurement tools. For the item pool, expert opinions were firstly taken into consideration, the content validity was examined, and necessary corrections were made. Then the pre-pilot study was carried out on 25 teachers and a number of corrections were made as a result of the study. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were performed for the validity of the study, and Cronbach alpha internal consistency coefficient for reliability and item total correlation was examined. Discussion: The results of the analyzes revealed that the scale consisted of 18 items and three dimensions. When evaluated in general, it can be said that the measurements made on the scale are valid and reliable.