Abstract
In a cross-sectional questionnaire study with N = 1045 German students between 13 and 18 years old (M = 14.1, SD = 0.6), we investigated the relation between students’ cyber-bullying perpetration and victimization and their personal belief in a just world (BJW). We considered students’ individual experience of teacher and classmate justice as possible mediators of these relations, and statistically controlled for student sex, internet use, empathy, and social desirability. Bootstrap mediation analyses showed that the more students endorsed personal BJW, the more they evaluated their teachers’ and classmates’ behavior toward them personally as just, and the less likely they were to report that they cyber-bullied others or were victims of cyber-bullying. The students’ individual experiences of teacher justice mediated the association between personal BJW and cyber-bullying perpetration, whereas their experience of classmate justice mediated the relation between personal BJW and cyber-bullying victimization. The pattern of results persisted when we controlled for student sex, average internet use per day, empathy, and social desirability. We discuss the adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research and practice.
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Notes
Cronbach (1951) showed that alpha depends on the number of items, and introduced rij est as an index of homogeneity which is independent of test length; for example, as a “rule of thumb”, a test with 16 items with α = .80 has a rij est = .20.
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We would like to thank Melanie Killian, Josephine Gherairi, and teacher trainee students at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg for helping us to collect the data.
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Donat, M., Rüprich, C., Gallschütz, C. et al. Unjust behavior in the digital space: the relation between cyber-bullying and justice beliefs and experiences. Soc Psychol Educ 23, 101–123 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-019-09530-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-019-09530-5