Cracking the Code of Cyberbullying Effects: The Spectator Sports Solution for Emotion Management and Well-Being Among Economically Disadvantaged Adolescents

This study explores the relationships among cyberbullying, emotion management, and well-being, with a focus on economically disadvantaged students. Employing a reflective factor model, we disentangle emotion management into four dimensions and explore how cyberbullying impacts these facets, influencing academic success and well-being. We also investigate the moderating role of sport spectatorship. Using survey data collected from 846 economically disadvantaged students in grades 7 to 12, within a racially diverse Texas school district (USA), we employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine relationships among the measured variables. The students were in grades 7 to 12, categorizing participants into spectatorship-adherent and non-spectatorship groups based on their sports-watching habits. Our findings emphasize the importance of addressing cyberbullying's impact on emotion management and underline the potential for sport spectatorship to mitigate these effects. Our findings reveal that cyberbullying victimization significantly impairs adolescents' emotion management (β = -0.33, <i>p</i> < 0.01), contributing to increased school absences (β = 0.41, <i>p</i> < 0.001) and offenses (β = 0.19, <i>p</i> = 0.02). Notably, sports spectatorship appears to buffer these negative outcomes for economically disadvantaged youth, enhancing overall well-being (β = 0.29, <i>p</i> < 0.01). This study ventures into the unexplored territory of sport viewership as a cost-effective intervention strategy, offering valuable implications in supporting adolescent well-being.