The Role of Irrational Beliefs and Social competence in Predicting Students' Cyber Bullying Experiences

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of irrational beliefs and social competence in predicting students' cyber bullying experience. The method of this research was descriptive-correlational. The statistical population of the present study consists of all male students of the second year of public high schools in Ardabil province in the academic year 2019-2020 (N = 21756). A total of 409 of these individuals were selected by cluster random sampling from the above statistical population and individually answered the questionnaires of bullying-cyberbullying experience, irrational beliefs and social competence. The data collected in this study were analyzed using Pearson correlation tests and multiple regression analysis. The results of correlation coefficient showed that cyber bullying experience has a positive relationship with irrational beliefs (p <0.001; r = 0.45) and a negative and significant relationship with social competence (p = 0.001; r = -0.41). Conclosion: regression analysis also showed that irrational beliefs in a positive way and social competence in a negative way are able to predict the experience of cyber bullying in students.