Poster #235 - Influence of social media use, parenting style and academic self-concept on Colombian teenagers’ academic performance

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Technology, Media & Child Development

Integrative Statement

A widely held media and public opinion nowadays is that young people’s academic performance can suffer due to them spending an increased amount of time on social media and other smartphone-based activities. Academic research on the matter is more mixed, with some studies showing that smartphone addiction can have serious effects on academic performance (e.g., Hawi & Samaha, 2016), while others suggest that students can use social media and smartphones to cooperate in their studies and even sometimes receive better grades (e.g., Peñuela, Paternina, Moreno, Camacho, Acosta, & De León, 2014). One potential explanation for this divergence in findings could be the influence of mediating variables such as self-concept and relationships with parents. Hence, this study aimed to see how parental styles and academic self-concept influence any relationship between use of social networks (and the Internet in general) and academic performance.
To do this, mixed-methods data collection was carried out with 176 tenth- and eleventh-grade students, aged 15–18 years, from a mixed-sex school in Bogotá, Colombia. Academic performance was measured through the official grades (in Mathematics and Spanish) received by students in their end-of-year exams. Parenting style was measured using the PCRI-M scale, originally developed by Steinberg (1992) and translated into Spanish by Soto and Arndt (2004). Academic self-concept was measured by the academic subscale of the multidimensional self-concept scale AF5, developed in Spanish by Musitu and García (2009). Internet use was measured in two ways: the Internet Addiction Test (IAT; translated into Spanish by Carbonel et al., 2012) to record general internet use, and some simple questions about amount of time spent weekly and daily on social media to record social media use in particular (following Vossen & Valkenburg, 2016). Finally, for the qualitative component of the data collection, participants were asked six semi-structured interview questions about their experience of social networks, whether they used them for academic purposes, and whether their use was regulated by parents.
Data showed that while there was a significant relationship between parenting style and internet use (with children of authoritarian and authoritative parents using the internet less) neither parenting style nor amount of internet use had a significant effect on academic results. Academic self-concept did show a positive relationship with academic results, and a negative relationship with internet use, but given the lack of a significant relationship between these other two variables, it cannot be seen as mediating that relationship. From the qualitative data, it was observed that young people approach online social networks as virtual meeting spaces, with a different relational logic from their face-to-face social circles. This is important because it means there may, for example, be more opportunities for individuals with high and low academic self-concepts to interact in both academic and non-academic discussions. It is possible that the increased opportunities for academic interactions cancel out the fact that internet-based non-academic activity is competing for adolescents’ time with more traditional academic activities such as homework, and lead to the null relationship we found between internet use and academic performance.

Authors

• Luis Alejandro Vallejo, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gordon Ingram, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
  Presenting Author