Youth Social Media Use: An Empirical Study Of Affinity Motivation, Online Social Capital, And The Spread Of Sexual Ideas

With the improvement of mobile Internet technology,social media such as QQ,Weibo,WeChat and TikTok is gradually integrated into the daily life of adolescents,which becomes an important factor affecting the socialization of adolescents.While promoting adolescents' instant messaging,entertainment,social communication and online learning,social media has also caused negative problems such as a flood of pornographic information,Internet addiction and cyber bullying,which has attracted wide attention from all walks of life.In this context,through questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with adolescents aged 10 to 18,this study summarizes the basic situation of adolescents' using social media and the forms of their affiliation motive.Meanwhile,this study investigated the key factors influencing teenagers' affiliation motive,online social capital and sexual opinions dissemination from two aspects of demographic variables and social media use.Structural equation modeling was then employed to examine the fit of the data to the model.In-depth interviews focus on subtle emotions and deep causes,aiming to explore the real relationship between adolescents and social media in modern society.The quantitative research finds out that the basic picture of adolescents' use of social media was roughly in line with the results of official surveys.Adolescents show four affiliation motives in the Internet interpersonal communications: social interaction,personal integration,social support and self-protection,among which personal integration motivation is the strongest.In addition,adolescents' online bridging social capital is more than bonding social capital,and the willingness of sexual opinions dissemination is significantly higher than the behavior.Among the demographic variables,gender and residence have a positively associated with adolescents' affiliation motive and online social capital,and gender and different grades positively affect sexual opinions dissemination.Social media use,including frequency and duration,is positively predicted them.Online social capital mediated the relationship between affiliation motive and sexual opinions dissemination.Moreover,the mediating effect of online social capital was positively moderated by gender.Compared to Female adolescents,the mediating effect was more profound in male adolescents.According to the structural equation modeling,online bonding social capital plays a more important role in the path that online social capitalmediated the relationship between affiliation motive and sexual opinions dissemination.Qualitative research shows that adolescents' use of social media looks satisfied on their faces,but they are actually addicted,resulting in a modern emotion drifting away from the edge of love and pain.Online social behaviors greatly increase the bridging social capital of adolescents,but it is difficult to transform the bridging social capital into bonding social capital.In contrast,online entertainment behaviors also help adolescents to build weak ties and increase bridging social capital,while weakening strong ties and damaging bonding social capital.The phenomenon that adolescents feel extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed when talking about sex has not fundamentally changed,but the third-person effect is remarkable.Finally,it is found that parent-child communication is very important for adolescents to accumulate social capital and form a healthy Sexual opinion.