Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.5559/di.26.1.04
Online Activities and Risk Behaviors among Adolescents in the Virtual Environment
Lucija Vejmelka
; Faculty of Law, Zagreb
Nives Strabić
; Zagreb
Marija Jazvo
; Zagreb
Abstract
Internet addiction and cyberbullying among youth are
phenomena that show a significant increase owing to the
development of technology and the wide accessibility of the
Internet. Research was conducted among adolescents (N =
352) in 9 randomly selected high schools in Croatia, with the
aim of investigating the relationship between habitual
Internet use and online risk behaviors among adolescents.
The standardized measuring instruments used in the research
were the Internet addiction test (Young, 1998) and The
European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire
(Del Rey et al., 2015) and questions about sociodemographic
characteristics of respondents and online
activities. The results show that 36.2% of the participants
exhibit different symptoms of Internet addiction, while 50.7%
of them partake in various forms of cyberbullying.
Furthermore, it is established that the amount of time spent
on the Internet on instant messaging, watching
movies/videos, listening to music and playing online games
correlates both with Internet addiction and with participating
in cyberbullying among young people. The research
confirmed the assumptions of the theory of routine activities
and the results indicate that perpetrators of cyberbullying
show a tendency to risky behavior also in other online
activities. The paper presents the relationship between the
level of Internet addiction and experience of cyberbullying
and provides guidelines for future research in this area.
Keywords
Internet addiction; cyberbullying; online activities; adolescents
Hrčak ID:
178527
URI
Publication date:
28.3.2017.
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