Problematic Online Behaviors and Experiences of Adolescents: Correlations with Parental Mediation, Information Disclosure and Personality Characteristics

Abstract

Online communication is ubiquitous in the adolescent culture. Beside numerous advantages of this kind of connection among people, there are also significant risks. The goal of this research is to examine the correlation between problematic online behavior and experience with certain social (parental mediation), cognitive (information disclosure) and personality factors (dimensions of self-evaluation and extraversion). The study included 339 adolescents aged 18 and 19 (135 boys, 204 girls). We examined online abuse, sexual behavior and sexual victimization; and these scales and a parental mediation scale were based on instruments used in contemporary research in these phenomena. The scale of information disclosure was constructed within the project of Safer Internet Centre Croatia, and dimensions of personality were measured by the subscales of the Big Five+2. The results of canonical correlation analysis conducted in this study support the idea that narcissism is important for engaging in problematic online behavior; the importance of extraversion was not confirmed.  An idea concerning the importance of the cognitive factor – privacy protection – is also supported. An idea that is not supported by the results is the importance of parental mediation in the prevention of problematic online behavior, and a probable reason for that is the age of respondents. The most significant implication of these results is raising awareness of the personal information protection on the Internet.