The Junior Students’ Internet Literacy Scale: Measure Development and Validation

Yinghui Huang, Hui Liu, Weijun Wang, Rouchun Dong and Yun Tang
Additional contact information
Yinghui Huang: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
Hui Liu: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
Weijun Wang: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
Rouchun Dong: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
Yun Tang: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 19, 1-16

Abstract: Despite the great attention paid to Internet literacy research, little has been done to overcome the problems stemming from the heterogeneity of Internet literacy nomenclature and the use of non-standardized measurement tools, especially for adolescents in developing countries. Considering junior students are the high-risk groups of Internet addiction and have wide access to the Internet, the aim of this study is to develop a new scale to assess Chinese junior students’ Internet literacy (JIL). In the psychometric study ( n = 1099 junior students), an 18-item scale was developed using the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which includes five subscales: knowledge and skills for the Internet (KSI), Internet self-management (ISM), awareness and cognition of Internet (ACI), Internet interactions (II), and autonomous learning on the Internet (ALI). Evidence of internal reliability, test-retest reliability, and construct validity provided good psychometric support for the measure. Criterion-related validity of the measures was demonstrated by examining its anticipated theoretical relations to two hypotheses: (1) High JIL level alleviates the adverse effects of an individual’s Internet addiction degree, while pathological use for interacting with others on the Internet exacerbates the adverse effects; (2) an individual’s degree of Internet use self-efficacy is positively associated with JIL level. It is envisaged that the JIL Scale will help facilitate unified research in the field.

Keywords: Internet literacy; Internet literacy scale; Internet addiction; junior students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/10120/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/10120/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:19:p:10120-:d:643748

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().