Personal and Family Sociodemographic Correlates of Types of Online Activities in School-Aged Children: a Multicountry Study

Jennifer Chun-Li Wu (), Sandra B. Sebre, Roma Jusienė, Vilmantė Pakalniškienė, Anika Miltuze and Yi-Fan Li
Additional contact information
Jennifer Chun-Li Wu: National Taipei University of Education
Sandra B. Sebre: University of Latvia
Roma Jusienė: Vilnius University
Vilmantė Pakalniškienė: Vilnius University
Anika Miltuze: University of Latvia
Yi-Fan Li: National Research Institute of Chinese Medicine

Child Indicators Research, 2021, vol. 14, issue 4, No 5, 1415-1434

Abstract: Abstract The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life, but analytical and systematic investigation of school-aged children’s online activities is lacking. This study aims to describe children’s Internet use according to types of online activities and examine the personal and family sociodemographic correlates of types of online activities within different sociocultural contexts. Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 840 children aged 8–10 years and their parents in Latvia, Lithuania and Taiwan. Children reported the frequency of using the Internet for ten specific activities, which were classified into the three distinct types of online activities, namely, information seeking, social interactions and entertainment, through multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. Overall, school-aged children used the Internet most frequently for entertainment and least frequently for social interactions, and Latvian children engaged the most frequently in all types of online activities. The multiple linear regression results show that in all three countries, children’s device ownership and use of the Internet to cope with negative emotions were the two most salient correlates of engagement in different online activities. Although family socioeconomic (e.g., parent’s education, financial status) differences in Internet usage types were not evident, there were country variations in the association of online activity types with family demographic factors (e.g., living arrangement, child’s number of siblings). This study identifies personal and family sociodemographic correlates of the types of activities children perform online and highlights differences in the comparison countries.

Keywords: Online activities; Internet use; Children; Multicountry study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12187-021-09805-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:chinre:v:14:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s12187-021-09805-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... f-life/journal/12187

DOI: 10.1007/s12187-021-09805-4

Access Statistics for this article

Child Indicators Research is currently edited by Asher Ben-Arieh

More articles in Child Indicators Research from Springer, The International Society of Child Indicators (ISCI)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().