Being Bullied and Becoming Depressed: An Empirical Study of Special Education School Children

Depression remains a pervasive mental health disorder globally, with a particularly concerning prevalence across South Asia. Among the numerous psychosocial determinants of depression, bullying has emerged as a significant and distressing contributor, especially for vulnerable populations such as students in special education settings. Despite the severity of this issue, empirical research addressing the intersection of bullying victimization and depressive symptoms among special education students in the Sri Lankan context remains limited, highlighting a critical research gap, which was the interest of this study. This study adopted a positivist, deductive, and quantitative research design, incorporating both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. The target population consisted of 551 special education students, from whom a stratified random sample of 241 participants was selected. Data were collected via a structured, validated questionnaire, and only 234 responses were analyzed using SPSS (version 21). Pearson correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, and independent sample T-test were employed to test the hypotheses, and the findings confirmed that relational bullying victimization, physical bullying victimization, and culture-based bullying victimization had a significant impact on depressive symptoms, whereas cyberbullying victimization was found to be an insignificant factor. Further, bullying victimization was not gender-specific in this sample and depressive symptoms were similar among both male and female children in special education setting. This study contributes substantively to the existing body of knowledge by validating the associations within a previously under-explored sociocultural context. Furthermore, the research offers critical insights for educators, policymakers, and mental health professionals by underscoring the necessity for context-specific interventions aimed at mitigating the psychological impact of bullying on special education students.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Journal of Business Studies

• Publication date

  2026-01-07

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.4038/jbs.v12i1.114
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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