The moderating effects of parenting styles on the relation between the internet attitudes and internet behaviors of high-school students in Taiwan

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how parenting styles moderate the relation between the Internet attitudes and behaviors of high-school-aged students in Taiwan. We review the literature on studies of parenting styles and Internet attitudes, and their relations between Internet behaviors. We employed Latent Class Analysis to cluster the child-reported parenting styles. In this regard, we found that there exist three types of parenting styles in Taiwan. We in turn implemented the 2nd-order confirmatory factor analysis to validate the 6-T internet attitude model. The so-called 6-T internet attitude model is to explain the Internet attitude by the multi-dimensions such as Tool, Telephone, Toy, Territory, Treasure and Trade. It provides the basis on which we conducted the structural regression modeling. Three kinds of Internet behavior “online social compensation seeking”, “online game addiction” and “information security behavior” are analyzed in our research. We used the structural regression modeling to incorporate the 2nd-order confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis so that we can tell the moderating effects of parenting styles on the relation between Internet attitudes and Internet behavior by multi-group analysis. The result revealed that parenting styles have moderation effect on the relation between Internet attitude and “information security behavior”. Implications of the findings were discussed followed by the statistical analysis.