Research Report
Online communication and subjective well-being in Chinese college students: The mediating role of shyness and social self-efficacy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.032Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A conformational mechanism model for online communication and subjective well-being is proposed.

  • The mechanism operating by shyness and social self-efficacy.

  • The influence of social self-efficacy varies between shy and no-shy participants.

  • The mechanism is moderated by gender.

Abstract

The present study attempts to examine the relationship between online communication and subjective well-being from the perspective of psychological need satisfaction, as well as the mediating role of shyness and social self-efficacy among Chinese college students. 574 college students with average age of 20 were asked to complete Psychological Need for Online Communication Scale, Shyness Scale, Social Self-efficacy Scale and Subjective Well-being Scale. SEM evidence supports the stimulation hypothesis, namely, the psychological needs satisfied by online communication can promote a person’s social self-efficacy and experience a higher evaluation of subjective well-being. Meanwhile, the psychological needs satisfied by online communication can also influence individuals’ status of shyness, which will decrease their social self-efficacy and lead to a lower subjective well-being. Furthermore, Chinese female college students obtain less social self-efficacy from the satisfaction of psychological needs through online communication than their male counterparts did, and resulted in less subjective well-being. The results are discussed in terms of psychological needs theory.

Introduction

Online communication is becoming increasingly common in college students (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005). According to the Thirtieth Statistical Report on Internet Development from the China Internet Network Information Center, there are 445 million Chinese people who are using online communication, accounting for 82.8% of all Internet users, and more than 30% of them are college students. Researchers pay more attention to the influences of online communication to peoples’ real life, such as relationship formation (McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002), interpersonal trust (Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009), information sharing (Butler, 2001), interpersonal trust (Valenzuela et al., 2009) and social adaption (Engelberg & Sjöberg, 2004), especially for subjective well-being (Kim and Lee, 2011, Schiffrin et al., 2010), but the results were controversial.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether psychological need satisfaction can explain the relationship between online communication and the subjective well-being of Chinese college students. Based on the use and gratification theory and the self-determination theory, the present study supposed that the satisfaction of psychological needs in online communication can promote the subjective well-being. Moreover, shyness and social self-efficacy may mediate the relationship between them. We applied the structure equation modeling (SEM) approach to assess the empirical strength of the relationships in the proposed model, and then use multi-group analysis to identify if the results would vary across gender.

This study includes 5 sections: Section 2 provides a literature review and research hypotheses; Section 3 describes the research method; Section 4 presents the results of data analysis. Finally, Section 5 makes the discussions and conclusions, and also presents limitations and implications for further researchers.

Section snippets

Literature review and hypotheses

American president Abraham Lincoln said that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, which is consistent with a general evaluation of one’s living conditions according to the standards set by oneself, namely, subjective well-being (SWB). This may be the most popular understanding of subjective well-being, which highlights the subjective evaluation of happiness. Psychologists have identified it as a person’s cognitive and affective evaluation of his or her life as a

Participants and procedures

The participants were 574 students (174 males and 381 females) recruited from four universities in Xi’an, China. The age range was 18–24 years (M = 19.9, SD = 0.96). Self-report questionnaires were completed by students in the classroom after obtaining informed consent. It took approximately 20 min for the students to complete all the instruments.

The Psychological Need for Online Communication Scale

The Psychological Need for Online Communication Scale (PNOC) consists of 33 items that measure the extent of psychological needs’ satisfaction and are rated

Results

Descriptive statistics and intercorrelations for all variables included are presented in Table 1. All variables were significantly correlated in the predicted directions.

Discussion

The current study examined the relationship between online communication and subjective well-being among Chinese college students from the perspective of psychological need, and the possible mediating effect of shyness and social self-efficacy. The best model supports the stimulation hypothesis, which emphasizes the enhancement effect of online communication on subjective well-being (Shaw & Gant, 2002); the more psychological needs fulfilled by online communication, the more well-being one will

References (60)

  • N.L. Collins et al.

    Self-disclosure and liking: A meta-analytic review

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1994)
  • Desjardins, J. (2011). An investigation of online communication and shyness. Doctoral dissertation, University of...
  • L. Donchi et al.

    It’s a boy thing: The role of the Internet in young people’s psychological wellbeing

    Behavior Change

    (2004)
  • S. Ebeing-Witte et al.

    Shyness, internet use, and personality

    CyberPsychology & Behavior

    (2007)
  • E. Engelberg et al.

    Internet use, social skills, and adjustment

    CyberPsychology & Behavior

    (2004)
  • C. Fan et al.

    Measuring social self-efficacy in a culturally diverse student population

    Social Behaviors and Personality: An International Journal

    (1998)
  • Grinter, R. E. & Palen, L. (2002). Instant messaging in teen life. In Processing of the 2002 ACM conference on computer...
  • E.F. Gross et al.

    Internet use and well-being in adolescence

    Journal of Social Issues

    (2002)
  • W.E. Haley et al.

    Appraisal, coping, and social support as mediators of well-being in Black and White family caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s disease

    Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

    (1996)
  • N.Z. Hampton

    Subjective well-being among people with Spinal cord injuries: The role of self-efficacy, perceived social support, and perceived health

    Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin

    (2004)
  • Z. Huang et al.

    Correlated factors comparison: the trends of computer game addiction and internet relationship addition

    Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology

    (2006)
  • Kahneman, D., Diener, E., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.). (2003). Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology. Russell Sage...
  • J. Kim et al.

    The facebook paths to happiness: Effects of the number of facebook friends and self-presentation on subjective well-being

    CyberPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking

    (2011)
  • H.C. Ko et al.

    Can blogging enhance subjective well-being through self-disclosure?

    CyberPsychology & Behavior

    (2009)
  • R. Kraut et al.

    Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?

    American Psychologist

    (1998)
  • R. Kraut et al.

    Internet paradox revisited

    Journal of Social Issues

    (2002)
  • F. Laghi et al.

    Knowing when not to use the Internet: Shyness and adolescents’ on-line and off-line interactions with friends

    Computers in Human Behavior

    (2012)
  • C.N. Larsen

    Social MUSHes and the anxiety of communication

    Journal of Virtual Environments

    (1998)
  • P. Lei et al.

    The relationship of adolescents’ personality with their using social service of Internet

    Acta Psychologica Sinica

    (2005)
  • A. Lenhart et al.

    Teens and technology: Youth are leading the transition to a fully wired and mobile nation

    (2005)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text