medical sciences students' exposure to cyber incivility in academic settings: a cross-sectional study

Background & objective: cyber incivility is a form of deviant social behavior that mainly happens on digital communication platforms such as emails, social media, and online learning systems. these behaviors can come from both students and instructors and may seriously disrupt the educational environment. this study aimed to find out the extent of medical sciences students' exposure to cyber incivility in academic settings.materials & methods: in this cross-sectional study, 700 medical sciences students were chosen using convenience sampling between 1 february and 1 june 2022. a 68-item researcher-made questionnaire with two sections was used for data collection. to study the data, descriptive and inferential statistics, including mann-whitney and kruskal-wallis tests, were used to compare the mean exposure-to-cyber-incivility scores across different demographic variables using spss software version 21.results: the mean students' exposure to cyber incivility was 134.5 ± 34.64 (range: 62–310). most participants reported a low to moderate level of exposure to cyber incivility, while less than 1% reported a high level. there were also important differences in the mean score for cyber incivility exposure based on gender (p = 0.015), age (p < 0.001), academic major (p < 0.001), education level (p = 0.001), and academic semester (p < 0.001).conclusion: the results showed a generally low level of student exposure to cyber incivility. future research using a mixed-methods approach with both students and instructors could give deeper insights into cyber incivility and its related factors.