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

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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.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the schools, students and parents who participated in this international collaborative study. The authors are also grateful to Professor Tung-liang Chiang, Associate Professor Baiba Martinsone and Dr. Ming-Yu Wang for their contributions to the development of research protocol and data collection.

Funding

This study was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (MOST 107–2923-H-152–001-MY3) as part of the mutual funds of Taiwan-Latvia-Lithuania cooperation project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Early Childhood and Family Education, National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jennifer Chun-Li Wu

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia

    Sandra B. Sebre & Anika Miltuze

  3. Institute of Psychology, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Roma Jusienė & Vilmantė Pakalniškienė

  4. Division of Clinical Chinese Medicine, National Research Institute of Chinese Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yi-Fan Li

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  1. Jennifer Chun-Li Wu
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  2. Sandra B. Sebre
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Correspondence to Jennifer Chun-Li Wu.

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Wu, J.CL., Sebre, S.B., Jusienė, R. et al. Personal and Family Sociodemographic Correlates of Types of Online Activities in School-Aged Children: a Multicountry Study. Child Ind Res 14, 1415–1434 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-021-09805-4

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