Donoso Gonzalo, Casas Ferran, Rubio Andrés, Céspedes Cristian
Research Institute on Quality of Life, Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain.
Innovation Center, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 16;12:641178. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.641178. eCollection 2021.
Subjective well-being is a broad category of phenomena that includes people's emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgments of life satisfaction. This research investigates how schoolchildren's subjective well-being is affected by the different types of technology use, in personal contexts, and, concurrently, whether these effects are different when the use of technology is problematic. The central hypotheses are as follows: (1) the use of the Internet affects the subjective well-being of schoolchildren negatively only when this use is problematic and (2) the effect on subjective well-being is different according to the type of Internet use. To respond to the objectives of the research, a survey was applied to 15-year-old adolescents (2,579 cases), distributed in 330 public schools, beneficiaries of a government program for the delivery of personal computers and Internet for a year. The different uses of the Internet were measured using frequency scales by type of activity (social, recreational, and educational). Problematic use scale measured the perception of negative consequences of the intensity of Internet use on a daily basis. Subjective well-being was measured by the Personal Well-Being Index-School Children (PWI-SC). Subsequently, for analytical purposes, three simple mediation models were created, whose dependent variable was PWI-SC, while its independent variables were Internet use scales differentiated by purpose (social, recreational, and educational) and problematic use as a mediating variable, as well as attributes of the subjects and their social environment, which were incorporated as control variables. The main results show that only if Internet use is expressed as problematic does it negatively affect subjective well-being. On the contrary, when the use of the Internet is not problematic, the effect is positive and even greater than the simple effect (without mediation) between these two variables. This finding is relevant, since it allows us to provide evidence that suggests that, when studying the effect that the intensity of the Internet, firstly, one must consider the mediating effect exerted by the network's problematic use and, secondly, that not all types of use have the same impact. Therefore, it is useful to enrich the discussion on subjective well-being and social integration of schoolchildren in the digital age.
主观幸福感是一个广泛的现象类别，包括人们的情绪反应、领域满意度以及对生活满意度的总体判断。本研究调查了在个人情境中，不同类型的技术使用如何影响学童的主观幸福感，同时研究当技术使用存在问题时，这些影响是否有所不同。核心假设如下：（1）只有当互联网使用存在问题时，其使用才会对学童的主观幸福感产生负面影响；（2）根据互联网使用类型的不同，对主观幸福感的影响也不同。为了实现研究目标，对15岁青少年（2579例）进行了一项调查，这些青少年分布在330所公立学校，他们是一项政府项目的受益者，该项目为他们提供个人电脑和互联网服务一年。互联网的不同使用情况通过按活动类型（社交、娱乐和教育）划分的频率量表来衡量。问题使用量表衡量了日常互联网使用强度的负面后果感知。主观幸福感通过儿童个人幸福感指数（PWI-SC）来衡量。随后，出于分析目的，创建了三个简单的中介模型，其因变量是PWI-SC，自变量是按目的区分的互联网使用量表（社交、娱乐和教育）以及作为中介变量的问题使用，同时将受试者及其社会环境的属性作为控制变量纳入。主要结果表明，只有当互联网使用被表示为存在问题时，它才会对主观幸福感产生负面影响。相反，当互联网使用不存在问题时，影响是积极的，甚至大于这两个变量之间的简单效应（无中介）。这一发现具有重要意义，因为它使我们能够提供证据表明，在研究互联网使用强度的影响时，首先必须考虑网络问题使用所产生的中介效应，其次并非所有类型的使用都具有相同的影响。因此，这有助于丰富关于数字时代学童主观幸福感和社会融入的讨论。
