| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 衛生福利研究所 === 106 === Background and objectives: Internet use has been a necessity in our daily life. Internet use has also become popular with regard to building social networks and communicating with others. Research shows that adolescents before 16 years old, or not having properly developed, tend to have little awareness of personal safety on the Internet. In case of that, this study pro-pose to explore the characterization associated with adolescent first Internet communication at age 16 or younger, with particular attention to behaviors such as making friends and instant chatting via the Internet, in peer and classroom contexts. The present study builds upon the ecological systems theory, exploring the relative effects of adolescent backgrounds, their classroom characteristics and peer activities, as well as examining the mechanism aforementioned associations. In the meanwhile, the present study examines whether stimulation hypothesis or displacement hypothesis is more appropriate to the context of Taiwan.
Methods: This study uses data from Taiwan Youth Project (TYP) longitudinal dataset, including 2,888 students from 81 classes, whom were 3rd grade of their Junior high school when 2000 years. The estimate of the age of first online communication is through mixing the answers of questionnaire from different waves data, then refers to references building variables of family, peer activities, classroom effects and risky behaviors, then build the models and conduct logistic regression to estimate the likelihoods of first Internet use at age 16 or younger. By these models, the roles of gender and family socioeconomic status are also addressed.
Results: In the total sample, the ratio of male and female is about 1.01: 1; one fourths (24.5%) of adolescents have their parental education with college and above, and 46.8% of adolescents involves their first Internet communication at age 16 or younger. In logistic regression models, family cohesion was negatively associated with first Internet communication before 16 years old. Class effects, namely the teacher's differential treatment, were negatively associated with female adolescents; the number of friends in the class was positively associated with all the students, especially on those whose family socioeconomic status was lower, but those who having higher parental education were not included. Peers’ activities also positively associated with involvement in first Internet communication among adolescents, especially for those male adolescents, and those who was having lower family socioeconomic status. In addition, to female adolescents and those with lower family socioeconomic status, damaging properties hostility is positively associated with involvement in first online communication. In multivariate analyses, the influences of the number of friends in the class became stronger among adolescents with the lower socioeconomic status and female adolescents; in contrast, the significant associations of having activities with peers and being female adolescent disappeared.
Discussions and Conclusions: The results of this study support the hypotheses of stimulation and displacement with regard to various situations with peers, classroom and family contexts. In the results, having more friends in the class and activities with peers are both having positive associations with first involvement in Internet communication at age 16 or younger, which supports the stimulation hypothesis, which also underlines that the more links with real society the adolescents have, the more online social ties they would have. In contrast, for those who have better family cohesion, and those who have stronger cohesion with their family, that would be tendency to support the replacement hypothesis, whom having lower odds to involvement in first online communication before 16 years old. However, all aforementioned are not working with those adolescents who has higher family socioeconomic status, none of the hypotheses is applicable. These findings provide a new perspective for the two hypotheses that have been debated since long time ago. The study also supports the influence of peer activities and classroom effects on adolescents, while verifying the role of gender and family socioeconomic status among adolescents and their early Internet communication. We know that in the context of Taiwan, the earlier usage of making online friends having positive relationship with adolescents’ social network construction. Hence, for the prevention of crime incidents about adolescents’ personal safety, it is not the best way to prohibit them using Internet to make friends, but should let them accept the education properly with the knowledge of personal safety on the Internet.
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