Children’s Internet Use Behavior And Its Relationship With Subjective Well-being

With the rapid development of information technology and widespread of Internet, the life of children has been greatly affected by the Internet. More and more children start using the Internet at a very early age. Such young group of Internet users have their own Internet use pattern, which is worthy of detailed study. We need to figure out how the Internet influences children’s development. Previous researches mostly focus on the college students or high school students. Little has been known about the online behaviors of primary school students. To fill the gap, this study investigated how the primary school students use the Internet, and whether the Internet use will influence the children’s well-being. It will be useful to future research and to provide guidance on children’s Internet use.This study adopted random cluster sampling. The sample was chose from a primary school in Wuhan. With a 12-month interval, we sent the questionnaires two times. The numbers of the subjects were 476 at the first time, and 478 at the second time. Questionnaires investigated the general characteristics of children’s Internet use behaviors, which mainly belongs to three categories:information seeking, online communication and online entertainment. The mediating effect of positive online emotion between children’s Internet behavior and their subjective well-being was explored. So did the moderating effect of extroversion. The main results are as follows:(1) The Internet behavior of Chinese primary school students had its own features, which was different from the use pattern of other groups. The most common Internet behavior of primary school students was information seeking, followed by online entertainment and online communication.(2) The subjective well-being of primary school students was above average, which accorded with the survey result got from adults.(3) Children’s information seeking behavior predicted higher subjective well-being in one year, while the predictive effects of online communication and online entertainment was not significant.(4) The positive online emotion mediated the relationship between information seeking and children’s subjective well-being, and also between online communication and subjective well-being. That is to say, information seeking and online communication could provide positive online emotion, and then improve children’s well-being.(5) Extroversion did not moderate the relationship between children’s Internet use and subjective well-being.