Cyberbullying victimization and perceived academic stress among vocational college students: the mediating roles of anxiety, insomnia, and self-control.

Introduction: Cyberbullying victimization has become an important risk experience in students' digital lives, yet its association with education-specific outcomes, such as perceived academic stress, remains underexplored, especially among vocational college students. This study examined the association between cyberbullying victimization and perceived academic stress, with particular attention to theoretically informed statistical indirect pathways involving anxiety, insomnia, and self-control. Methods: Data were collected from vocational college students in Chongqing and Zhejiang, China. After data screening, 378 valid responses were retained. Participants completed standardized and research-version measures of cyberbullying victimization, anxiety, insomnia, self-control, and perceived academic stress. Analyses included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and bias-corrected bootstrap analysis with 5,000 resamples using SPSS 27.0.1 and AMOS 24. Results: Cyberbullying victimization was positively associated with anxiety, insomnia, and perceived academic stress, and negatively associated with self-control. Both the five-factor measurement model and the structural model showed good fit to the data. In the structural model, cyberbullying victimization was significantly positively associated with anxiety and perceived academic stress and negatively associated with self-control. Anxiety was positively associated with insomnia, insomnia was positively associated with perceived academic stress, and self-control was negatively associated with perceived academic stress. Bootstrap analyses supported significant total, direct, and indirect associations, indicating a statistical partial mediation pattern. Discussion: Cyberbullying victimization was associated with vocational college students' perceived academic stress both directly and through statistically supported indirect pathways involving anxiety-insomnia and self-control. These findings extend cyberbullying victimization research into the educational domain and provide preliminary implications for student identification, counseling, and support in vocational colleges. Given the cross-sectional self-report design, the observed pathways should be interpreted as theoretically grounded statistical associations rather than confirmed temporal or causal mechanisms.