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Online Activities and Psychological Well-Being among Youth
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Online Activities and Psychological Well-Being among Youth

A special issue of Youth (ISSN 2673-995X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2023) | Viewed by 3921

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Jeong Jin Yu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Educational Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), Suzhou, China
Interests: psychological well-being; self-systems; parent-child relations; cross-cultural differences; online activities; multivariate longitudinal data analysis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Today’s youth are digital natives who live their lives online from a young age. Online activities such as social networking, chatting, sexting, dating, gaming, and shopping have become an integral part of the daily lives of youth (particularly during the current COVID-19 crisis), but can pose multiple psychological risks to them. While young people or digital natives enjoy a strong sense of autonomy and competence and develop a sense of self, identity, community, and belonging through their intensive online activities on a daily basis, this could impose a massive burden of cost on youth, family, school, and society. However, our scholarly understanding of obsessive online activities among youth and their causes, consequences, correlates, and interventions over time and across contexts remains rudimentary and has lagged behind the technologies to which they are related. Keeping these facts in mind, the proposed Special Issue will attempt to address these timely and crucial issues and will provide in-depth insights into the phenomenon of online communities of youth in the digital era. Given the correlational nature of much of the extant literature, this Special Issue particularly welcomes empirical studies that explicitly investigate causal or even transactional relationships between a range of online activities and psychological well-being in youth and/or identify relevant mediators and moderators of these relationships. From a practical standpoint, key findings from the Special Issue will provide insightful implications for concerns, tensions, and conflicts surrounding youth online activities in the home, school, and public spaces and will offer several practical implications for prevention and intervention efforts to promote psychological well-being among heavy online users at individual, family, school, and community levels across contexts.

Dr. Jeong Jin Yu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • smartphone use
  • Internet addiction
  • problematic Internet use
  • Internet gaming disorder
  • sexting
  • online dating
  • social networking
  • cyberbullying

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 318 KiB  
Article
Social Isolation and Online Relationship-Risk Encounters among Adolescents with Special Educational Needs
by Aiman El-Asam, Lara Jane Colley-Chahal and Adrienne Katz
Youth 2023, 3(2), 671-688; https://doi.org/10.3390/youth3020044 - 17 May 2023
Viewed by 2227
Abstract
While all vulnerable adolescents are more at risk online than their non-vulnerable peers, those with special educational needs (SEN) require targeted and specialised support. Although they are not a homogenous group, SEN adolescents commonly experience social isolation and a lack of connection or [...] Read more.
While all vulnerable adolescents are more at risk online than their non-vulnerable peers, those with special educational needs (SEN) require targeted and specialised support. Although they are not a homogenous group, SEN adolescents commonly experience social isolation and a lack of connection or meaningful relationships with peers in their offline lives. Many perceive the internet as a route to alternative means of communicating and interacting with others. Accessibility tools enable autonomous access to the online world, which offers support groups, new friends, entertainment, and connections. This can lead to both potential online relationship-risk encounters and positive experiences. With the attraction of online environments comes the need for digital skills and awarness of possible online risks, yet for adolescents with SEN, their difficulties dictate a need for more than rules, controls, and digital skills. In this study, 4894 adolescents aged 13 to 17, of whom 1207 had SEN, completed the Cybersurvey 2019, an online questionnaire about their digital life. Adolescents were asked about the benefits of using the internet, their online safety support, offline social support, and any online relationship-risk encounters. All participants were recruited through their schools. Descriptive statistics and multiple analysis of variance tests showed that, compared with their peers, adolescents with SEN experienced significantly more social isolation and less parental online safety support. They were also more likely to use the internet for positive purposes, such as socialising and coping. Overall, adolescents with SEN encountered more online relationship risks than their non-SEN peers, with older teens more likely to encounter such risks than younger peers, regardless of their SEN status. Multiple analysis of variance tests also identified that boys perceive internet use as positive to a greater extent than girls, suggesting a gender difference in experiences of the digital environment. A multiple linear hierarchical regression revealed that SEN status, age, social isolation, poor parental online safety support, and greater perceived positive internet use, all significantly predicted online relationship-risk encounters. This article discusses important implications and recommendations for policy and practice related to SEN and online safety and highlights areas for future research to consider. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Online Activities and Psychological Well-Being among Youth)
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