Youth Sustainable Digital Wellbeing

Abstract

Digital well-being emerged as a postmodern concept describing the overflowing daily input of information and social networking options. The theoretical literature frameworks related to digital skills are not specifically considering some particular abilities needed for coping with daily interactions’ overwhelming and currently depict two sides of the digital well-being story: as a personal obtainable status through individual digital wellbeing abilities and skills, and on the other hand as a specificity common to a social community where values, norms, and aspirations bring valuable inputs to the safety, comfort, self-satisfaction along with socio-psychological fulfillment of group members. In order to investigate the interactions of the youth digital well-being, our team has implemented the project Hate’s Journey funded under Erasmus+. Our research team has designed a multiple specific sections online questionnaire addressing 206 youth from Turkey, Spain, Latvia, and Romania. We have used a SEM analysis approach with the purpose of providing model fit output about the consistency of the hypothesized mediation model: youth online duality, considered a correlate of digital well-being, mediates the relationship between the predictor helpfully perceived network and the outcome, emotional regulation. Consistent with previous research, our results support the hypothesis that youth online duality totally mediates the relationship between the helpfully perceived digital environment and youth digital emotional regulation. Conclusions and implications are discussed.