Abstract
Social behavior is closely linked to self-efficacy, which is the individual’s confidence or belief that they can successfully complete a task in a given situation. The advent of social media classified social behavior as online and offline sociality, and has cultivated inconsistency in online and offline social behavior of university students, an issue that has come to prominence in scholarly research. However, the relationship between this inconsistency and self-efficacy is worthy of investigation because this particular confluence of behavioral concepts has been rarely been researched. In this paper, online and offline social behavior is integrated, a typology for university student social activities established, and the correlation between different types of social activity and student self-efficacy investigated, with a specific focus on those with notable inconsistencies in their social performance. The following findings are reported. First, as online social networking has become the dominant form of social interaction, the types of social activity have increased, with one-third of university students showing inconsistent online and offline social behavior. However, different types of social activities have varied effects on the self-efficacy of university students, with differences between general self-efficacy, which is significantly above academic self-efficacy, and social self-efficacy. These effects are also different for students with inconsistent online and offline social performance; those who are active online show higher self-efficacy than those who are active offline. This study shows online social network interactions to be more closely related to student self-efficacy than offline interactions.
Highlights
With the widespread use of social media, online networking has emerged as the important form of social interaction
Many researchers have analyzed how offline social behavior influences online social behavior; conflicts in social behavior between physical and virtual spaces have drawn little attention. To help explain this phenomenon, in this study, a university student social typology comprising four types of social activity was constructed by utilizing characteristics of social behavior in both online and offline spheres
The results suggest that the widespread use of social media has led to the prominent emergence of different types of social activity, and inconsistent online and offline social behavior has become commonplace
Summary
With the widespread use of social media, online networking has emerged as the important form of social interaction. This study was made to determine if the inconsistency between online and offline social activity is commonplace among university students. It is aimed at determining if the self-efficacy of students with conflicting online and offline social behavior is distinct from those with consistent social behavior and, if so, to identify the differences and how to measure them. To address the propositions above, in this paper, the online and offline social behavior of university students is integrated, the types of social activity classified using two-dimensional indicators, and selfefficacy of the groups compared, with a special focus on those with inconsistent social behavior
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