The Structure And Factors Of Adolescents' Healthy Behavior Of Internet Use

As a newly developed media, the internet has been accepted by more and more people and exerted great impact on the physical and mental development of adolescents in the transition period. At present, parents, schools and the whole society most concern how to help adolescents make advantage of the internet instead of being additive to it. Based on the positive psychology, ecological theory and constructivism, this study carried on the theoretic and empirical research on adolescents' healthy behavior of internet use.Focused on the qualitative method, 52 students from the university and high school of more than 20 cities in China were interviewed. Based on the results of interview, various methods, including grounded theory, individual analysis, quantitative measures and statistical methods were applied to define the concept, structure and factors of adolescents' healthy behavior of internet use, then the relationship between adolescents' healthy behavior of internet use and Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) were discussed.The results are as following:(1) From the point of the qualitative research, the healthy behavior of internet use indicates that adolescents can control their behavior voluntarily, improving their academic achievement and their physical and metal development. The concept is full of characteristic of systematism, activity, control, subjectivity and stability.(2) The structure consists of 4 major types such as the "healthy type", "growing type", "satisfactory type", and "borderline type", which were defined as "the four-quadrant structure".(3) The manipulative criteria include comprehensive criterion and time referenced criterion. The comprehensive criteria are shown in the 6 items of "resisting to the bad effect", "not being additive to the net", "controlling time", "relaxing oneself, "making good use of net for study", "influencing extent". Anyone who meets the need of the 5 and above items could be recognized as a healthy internet user. The time referenced criterion means that the time spent on the net is less than one hour and a half everyday, and ten hours per week.(4) There are multiple possible internet uses between the healthy behavior and IAD, both of which belong to any type of behavior of net use.(5) Among the environmental factors affecting greatly the healthy behavior of internet use, parents play the primary role, and then do the peer, then the society, teacher and school. All the factors could be classified into 3 kinds, one is the guiding role played by parents-society, the other is instruction role played by teacher-school, and another is metal imitating role between self and peer.(6) The self-resistance is most important one among the internal factor; the attitude variable ranks second, such as the attitude to the net, moral and healthy behavior of internet use; then are the goal, pleasure experience, optimism and self-confidence.(7) Different factors play various parts in the internet use behavior, among which the personality factors (self-resistance, self-confidence and optimism) exert direct impact on the behavior; the dynamic cognitive factors (internet attitude, goal, interest, etc) influence the net behavior via personality factors; the external factors (parents, teachers and society) affect the behavior by the cognitive factors.The research made some contribution from eight aspects: (1) to define the healthy behavior of internet use scientifically; (2) to put forward the manipulative criteria on the net use behavior; (3) to raise the four-quadrant structure of healthy behavior; (4) to find the mental reason resulting in the IAD; (5) to demonstrate the relation between the healthy behavior of internet use and IAD; (6) to discover that internet attitude and goal can not only result in IAD, but also improve adolescents' healthy behavior of internet use; (7) to discover the various internal and external factor positively affecting the behavior and the interactive structure; (8) to indicate that some important people known from the net would play the same part in shaping the healthy internet use behavior as parents, peers and teachers.