Adolescent academic achievement, bullying behavior, and the frequency of internet use

Using two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), I investigated the relationships among bullying behaviors, internet use, and academic achievement for Black, Hispanic, and White boys and girls. I assessed three measures of academic achievement, including scores on mathematics, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. The four goals of this research project were (1) to investigate the relationships among bullying behaviors, internet use (e.g., chatting, e-mailing, surfing) and academic achievement, (2) to explore whether bullying behaviors and internet use affects academic achievement over time, (3) to test if internet use moderates the relationship between bullying behaviors and academic achievement, and (4) to test if race and gender gaps in achievement persist once accounting for the relationships among bullying behavior, internet use, and social capital.

Findings indicate bullying by itself does not have a significant association with achievement outcomes, while the influence of internet use varies in significance and direction of effect based on type of use. Chatting was the only measure of internet use that consistently had a significant negative relationship across all achievement outcomes. The association between bullying behaviors and academic achievement was moderated by some forms of internet use such that at low levels of bullying, children with low levels of internet use had significantly higher test scores. As levels of bullying increased, low/high internet users test scores converged to the point that at high levels of bullying behaviors, differences in test scores between low/high internet users were statistically insignificant. Email use and surfing the web were found to moderate the association between bullying behaviors and reading comprehension. Surfing moderated bullying and math scores. Chatting moderated the relationship between bullying and each of the three outcomes. Lastly, there were no significant race or gender differences in vocabulary or math scores, after controlling for SES, internet use, parent/child relationships and time 1 measures. However, African American (compared to Whites) did less well on reading comprehension scores.