Abstract
AimTo investigate the longitudinal impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on Internet use in adolescents.MethodsThree waves of data on a longitudinal cohort of 7th grade students (N = 2430) were retrieved from the Taiwan Youth Project. Univariate and multivariate regression models were applied using crude and adjusted odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) to examine the concomitant impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on adolescent Internet use.ResultsThe dataset identified 210 (8.7%) students using the Internet for more than 20 hours/week, and 81 (3.3%) were viewing pornographic material online. Early maturing and thin-weight adolescents were at 35% and 46% increased risks of spending long hours on Internet use, respectively. While early puberty was associated with online pornography viewing among males (adjusted OR 1.84, 95% CI 1.04–3.28), early puberty was contrarily a protective factor against online gaming in females (adjusted OR 0.59, 95% CI 0.36–0.96).ConclusionEarly puberty was found to be positively related to adolescent Internet use. Appropriate health education and guidance regarding Internet use should be provided to those with different developing needs.
Highlights
In an era of digitized technology, the Internet has rapidly evolved into a new platform of information, communication and entertainment, but it can be a potentially hazardous medium due to unverified or uncensored content, for young people [1]
While early puberty was associated with online pornography viewing among males, early puberty was contrarily a protective factor against online gaming in females
Puberty was found to be positively related to adolescent Internet use
Summary
In an era of digitized technology, the Internet has rapidly evolved into a new platform of information, communication and entertainment, but it can be a potentially hazardous medium due to unverified or uncensored content, for young people [1]. Problematic Internet users, like those who are excessively playing online games, frequently checking emails, or viewing pornography, could spend twice that amount of time [2]. This figure is comparative in high school students in Taiwan, where academic achievement is highly stressed and online gaming is highly developed and mainly focuses on this particular age group [2,3,4]. Previous research has shown a U-shaped association between Internet use and adolescent psychosocial problems [9], which indicates that the purposes or content of online activities may underlie the link between the intensity of Internet use and an unhealthy weight status, if there is one. Given that the inferential relationship between weight status and the Internet use could be bidirectional, further research attention should be given to analyze the effect of weight status on adolescent Internet use
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