Digital citizenship competencies and cyberbullying involvement among university students

Cyberbullying remains a persistent concern in higher education, yet the digital competencies most relevant to victimization and perpetration are not well specified in integrated university models. This cross-sectional survey of university students in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan (N = 1546) examined associations between two digital citizenship domains: Digital Fitness (skills-based competence in digital literacy, safety, and resilience) and Digital Responsibility (ethics-/norms-based competence in interpersonal ethics, community responsibility, and legal compliance). The multi-country design enables examination of digital citizenship-cyberbullying associations across differing educational and socio-normative contexts. Pearson correlations assessed bivariate associations with victimization and perpetration, structural equation modeling (SEM) evaluated an integrated latent competence representation, and multivariate regression examined the relative contribution of sub-dimensions. Higher Digital Fitness and Digital Responsibility were associated with lower victimization and perpetration, while victimization and perpetration substantially overlapped (r = .91). Digital Fitness and Digital Responsibility were strongly correlated (r = .79), indicating high shared variance when modeled simultaneously. Across multivariate specifications, digital literacy and community responsibility demonstrated the most consistent negative associations with cyberbullying involvement. Although some sub-dimensions yielded counter-directional partial effects and structural model fit was mixed, these findings were interpreted cautiously given measurement overlap and analytic constraints. Group comparisons indicated robust country differences across competencies and cyberbullying outcomes, largely null gender differences, and small discipline differences for competence but not for cyberbullying. Findings support intervention approaches that strengthen core skills (especially literacy) alongside community-oriented responsibility in university settings, while prioritizing scale refinement to better distinguish skills- and ethics-based components.