Senior High School Students Cyberbullying Experience: A Case of University in the Philippines

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Senior High School Students Cyberbullying Experience: A
Case of University in the Philippines
Emmanuel Vargas
College of Information Technology
Education
363 P. Casal Street, Quiapo
Manila, Philippines
vargasemmanuel97@gmail.co
m
Jasmin D. Niguidula
College of Information Technology
Education
363 P. Casal Street, Quiapo
Manila, Philippines
jasniguidula@yahoo.com
Alexander A. Hernandez
College of Information Technology
Education
363 P. Casal Street, Quiapo
Manila, Philippines
alexander.hernandez@tip.edu.
ph
Praxedis S. Marquez
College of Information Technology
Eduation
363 P. Casal Street, Quiapo
Manila, Philippines
mayamarquez@yahoo.com
Jonathan M. Caballero
College of Information Technology
Education
363 P. Casal Street, Quiapo
Manila, Philippines
jonathancaballero@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Twitter is widely used to explore on the opinions of the public in
variety of topics. It has constantly gained popularity as good
source of information for visualization-centered application. This
paper aims to understand the opinions of senior high school
students’ on cyberbullying in a university in the Philippines. This
study uses a tweet visualization tool to present the opinions of
students. The results of the study indicate that most of the students
feel pleasant on cyberbullying as the university administration
officers continuously drives information awareness campaign that
decreases fear and unpleasant emotion among the senior high
school students. Therefore, cyberbullying among senior high
school students remain an important concern for educators and
students. This study suggests practical and research
recommendations.
CCS Concepts
• Information retrieval➝Retrieval tasks and goals •Sentiment
analysis
Keywords
Sentiment Analysis; Opinion Mining; Twitter; Online Resources;
1. INTRODUCTION
Social media has a vital role in today’s digital society. It has a
significant part of information and events dissemination in the
wireless community [1]. Social media gives the opportunity to
communicate to different people regardless of place and time.
Most importantly, social media is used for socializing allowing
people to participate in conversations and online dialogue without
being face-to-face with others [2].
Sentiment analysis results provide useful knowledge of general
sentiment towards topics. It is an area of research that investigates
people’s feelings towards different matters, products, events,
organizations [3]. It has vital role in the growing use of social
networks, micro-blogging applications and forums [4]. Everything
in the internet especially the web pages have a section for users to
leave and state their comments about products or services, events,
institutions and they can also share this on Facebook, Twitter or
Pinterest. The sentiment of a document or sentence can be
positive, negative or neutral. [5].
Twitter is an open social environment where there are no
restrictions on what users can tweet about. Twitter is a popular
online micro-blogging service launched in 2006. It contains a
large number of irregular words and non-English symbols and
characters [16]. Users on Twitter have been growing fast every
day, and it gave an opportunity to organizations to monitor their
activities and updates by extracting and analyzing the sentiments
and opinions of the public by means of tweets [7]. Twitter
sentiment analysis tweets data used to generate and review
sentiments and opinions by the netizen. With this, we will know
the so-called “trending topics” [8, 9]. The trending topics are
mostly noisy and it contains enormous opinions. These sentiments
are present in the tweets providing significant indicators for
various purposes, in which positive and negative groups are found
among the sentiments [10].
This paper aims to understand the sentiments of students on cyber
bullying experience in a university in the Philippines.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Cyber-bullying is a negative act of the user using social
networking for making fun of another user, for harassing a user
over an instant messaging, for posting picture without permission
of the user or even false rumors [11]. While bullying typically
happens at school, cyberbullying takes place over cyberspace.
Because of modern technology it easy to users to post a message
destroying the reputation of other social media users [12].
However, cyber-bullying is covered by existing laws against
personal threats and harassment [13, 14]. In some cases, it may be
advisable to inform the school principal or consult a legal counsel

[15, 16]. The law prohibits bullying, including cyber-bullying that
occurs inside or outside of school when it affects student life
within school, insist all schools to create anti-bullying policy,
discipline bullying, and notify parents, and local law enforcement
when needed [17, 18]. Cyberbullying is one of the top challenges
facing public schools. There are many recurring legal problems
confronting public schools [19]. Educators are mostly challenged
in developing policies and guidelines to prevent the utilization of
technology to bully other students. To raise awareness to students
and school personnel, educators establishes systems for reporting
and monitoring of students use of technology within the campus
[20]. Thus, these circumstances contribute to a wider appreciation
of cyberbullying experience of students within and outside the
campus.
Sentiment analysis is being utilized in most of social and business
discipline as sentiments are mainly present in everyday activities,
and considered explainers of human behaviors. Opinions,
perceptions of realistic events, beliefs and decisions are trained on
how other people see and assess situations or events. Most of the
time, a person seeks opinion from others before making a
decision. These situations commonly exist in persons and firms.
However, there are limited studies investigating the sentiments of
senior high school students in cyberbullying, thus, in the
Philippines, cyber bulling is also a main concern in the education
sector. At this point, this research aims to explore on the
sentiments on cyberbullying in a senior high school program of a
university in the Philippines.
3. METHODOLOGY
This set of procedures visualizes the different Tweets of senior
high school program students in a university in the Philippines.
Students posted their views and opinions of cyberbullying with
#uphslcyberbullyingsh. There were at least 100 students who
posted their tweets on the cyberbullying topic. The data were
extracted in Twitter from September 12-30, 2016. This study uses
Healy and Ramswamy (2011) tool for analyzing emotions in
Twitter. It visualizes the emotions in Twitter messages by means
of graphical representation of Russell and Barret (1998) emotion
grid (Figure 1) and represents topics with word clouds. The
visualization approach uses a multi-dimensional plane for
representing emotions which describes an affect using two
bipolar, orthogonal, independent dimensions valence and arousal.
The two dimensions represent the degree of pleasantness and the
degree of activation. The central idea of the model is that the
entire space can be thought of as degrees of pleasantness or
unpleasantness and activation or deactivation. It also displays the
topics and emotion information in separate views.
Figure 1. Semantic Structure of Affect
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This section presents the results of the study with sentiments
visualized in different approach.
Using tweet sentiment visualization, the data were presented in
various forms. The tweets on the keywords #uphslcyberbullyingsh
was started on September 14 - 30, 2016 by senior high school
students of a university in the Philippines.
Figure 2 Tweets on Cyberbullying Topic
Figure 2 shows the tweets of the students with varying senitments.
The total tweets counted were 217 from senior high school
students twitter account. Some students posted that the
cyberbulliying can affect their studies and threaten students’
physical and emotional safety at school and can negatively impact
their ability to learn. Most the students are not in favor or
expressed negative opinion to cyberbullying because they
encountered and received embarrassing messages from other
senior high school students. The results indicate that the students
were aware that cyberbullying among them constantly increases
over time.

Figure 3. Sentiments Region
Figure 3 shows the representation of emotions of all tweets by
senior high school students. First, the tweets were individually
presented in the form of circle in multiple colors. The color
signifies the overall valence or pleasure of the tweet including
green for pleasant and blue for unpleasant tweets. Second, the
overall arousal of the tweet is presented by brightness, active
tweets are set brighter and passive tweets are darker. Lastly, the
size measures the confidence of the tweet approximations, a
higher tweet agree to more confident estimate.
Figure 3 presents that most of the senior high school students felt
pleasant about their cyberbullying experience and some of them
felt unpleasant. The results also show that some students are
tensed, sad, upset and alert on cyberbullying. Moreover, there
were students who felt pleasant about cyberbullying. Some
students felt calm, relaxed, and happy which indicated that few
students are not interested about cyberbullying topic. The diagram
shows that almost 70 percent of the tweets were active (pleasant)
while 30 percent of the tweets comprise subdued (unpleasant)
emotions. The findings indicate that most students were
unpleasant about the cyberbullying topic. The results can be
attributed to the likelihood that students experienced some forms
of cyberbullying.
Figure 4. Sentiments Cluster Topics
Figure 4. shows the 217 tweets common topic are in the topic
cluster, some of the students had unfavorable opinions which
which were negative acts for some students in some forms social
media verbal abuse. Also, some students were favourable to
bullying and gave negative tweets for fun. However, the
remaining tweets were classified in singletones which means that
most of the tweets were not included in the main clusters
covering: prevent, school, bullying.
Figure 5. Heatmap
The results indicate that the senior high school students had
negative point of view when it comes to cyberbullying within the
university. There were more students who believe that
cyberbullying affects their stay in school as well as their
performance.
Figure 6. Tagcloud
Figure 6 shows the typical terms used of the senior high school
students in four open areas. The left corner was unpleasant, and
the right corner pleasant, in the upper right corner was happy, the
lower right corner was relaxed, and the lower left corner was
upset. The bigger words represent common topics, while the
smaller words represent least tweets.
The results indicate that more students expressed that
cyberbullying is wrong, might result to suicide activity, is a crime,
and mostly happens in school. Also, there were students who hate
bully, and believe that cyberbullying must stop within the school
and the community. However, there were bigger clouds indicating
positive opinion to cyberbullying such as stopping, prevent,
blocking, and should be assisted by making their parents online.
They also believe that they can share pleasant actions and
situations on the circumstances of cyberbullying. This can be
attributed to the response of the Philippine government of passing
the bill for cyberbullying.

Figure 7. Affinity of Tweets
The results indicate that most of the tweets were associated with
#cyberbullying, #bullying and others. There were no cluster of
topic affinity available in the tweets made by the students.
5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURWORK
This study explores on the cyberbullying opinions of senior high
school students in the Philippines. The study concludes that most
students felt unpleasant and not comfortable with cyberbullying
experience and others doing it. The growing cyberbullying
experience of the students can be attributed to the proliferation of
social media among senior higher students in the university. By
reviewing and developing policies and procedures related to
cyberbullying, more students and parents would understand its
implications to students behavior, performance and activities.
These activities can increase the awareness of senior high
students, administrators, teachers and the entire school community
that cyberbullying is a crime, and it affects the social behavior of
the students in school or can be outside of school. The results also
indicate that more students were becoming aware that
cyberbullying can be solved in many ways, and can be good
opportunity to help others who have experienced it.
However, this is preliminary study of cyberbullying opinions of
students in the Philippines, thus, a more comprehensive study is
needed to investigate on the internal and external issues involved
in cyberbullying within a university. Also, cyberbulling is an
interesting topic to explore as social media is slowly being
integrated to enhance the learning experience of the students.
Moreover, it is not only the use of social media, as well as
exploring the policies and procedures of a university on
cyberbullying, how they respond on it, and assist students not to
experience these situations.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The researchers would like to acknowledge T.I.P. for providing
financial support in this study.
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