The boredom proneness levels of Chinese college students increased over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 2009 to 2020

Abstract

Little is known about the features and social determinants of boredom proneness in college students. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine the features and social determinants of college students' boredom proneness via a cross-temporal meta-analysis of Chinese college students' boredom proneness levels from 2009 to 2020. Sixty-four studies (N = 28,269) that used the boredom proneness questionnaire formulated by Farmer and Sundberg (1986) and modified by Huang et al. (2010) were analyzed. In addition, direct and lag correlation analyses were adopted to investigate the association between boredom proneness and the macrosocial environment. Our results have demonstrated that boredom proneness has increased by 14.26 points (d = 1.57) over the past 11 years, indicating a large change. Macrosocial indicators, including social connectedness (i.e., the divorce rate and the urbanization level), economic condition (i.e., GDP per capita), and internet condition (i.e., internet usage per capita, internet penetration rate and the mobile phone penetration rate), are important predictors of increasing boredom proneness.