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