Analyzing negative SNS behaviors of elementary and middle school students in Korea

Abstract

With the growing speed of SNS accelerated recently, there are increasing concerns about the possibility of young students doing negative SNS behavior. This study tried to discover the relationship between various variables such as gender, grade, SNS usage time, motives to use SNS, degree of using advanced functions of SNS, SNS dependency, and perceptions about SNS with negative SNS behaviors among elementary and middle school students. The analyses revealed that regardless of gender and grade, the most frequently committed negative behavior is ‘stealing others’ private information’ and the least is ‘cyber bullying’, while ‘contacting strangers’ showing the most significant increase with the age. With the seriousness of negative SNS behaviors classified into four levels, it was found that the biggest significant difference across the levels appears on illegal use of photos and videos, followed by on verbal abuse and on cyber bullying. It was also found that a significant positive correlation exists between each of the factors considered and the negative SNS behavior. Based on these findings, a regression analysis was conducted to successfully extract several factors as significant predictors of the negative SNS behaviors. Furthermore, factors distinguishing the lowest level from the highest level of the negative SNS behaviors were identified to be gender, SNS dependency, utilization of advanced SNS functions, and grade, with its accuracy rate reaching as high as 85.6%.