The Impact Of College Students’ Online Social Anxiety On Problematic Internet Use

As digital native,unreasonable Internet use of college students has always been the focus of many research subjects.However,compared with Internet addiction and pathological Internet use,problematic Internet use of college students has received less attention from Chinese researchers.Although problematic Internet use behavior will not cause clinical pathological symptoms,it will not only affect the study and life of college students,but may also endanger the development of physical and mental health.Therefore,it is very necessary to ascertain the influencing factors of problematic Internet use by college students.Previous studies have found that social anxiety can positively predict problematic Internet use.However,the relationship between online social anxiety and problematic Internet use remains to be explored.Therefore,this study takes the cognitive-behavioral theory model as the main framework,and combines the theory of self-efficacy and the related research of new media literacy.This paper constructs a research model with online social anxiety as independent variable,problematic Internet use as dependent variable,social self-efficacy as intermediary variable and new media literacy as moderating variable,to explore the impact of online social anxiety on questionable Internet use and its internal mechanism.In this study,462 college students were surveyed by questionnaire,and SPSS25.0 and Amos23.0 were used to analyze the questionnaire data.The results showed that:(1)Online social anxiety positively affects problematic Internet use.(2)Social self-efficacy plays a part of mediating role between online social anxiety and problematic Internet use.Evaluation anxiety and interaction anxiety can affect social comfort,loneliness/depression,diminished impulse,and distraction/avoidance through social self-efficacy.(3)Critical Consuming literacy,functional prosuming literacy and critical prosuming literacy played a moderating role between online social anxiety and problematic Internet use,and with the increase of each moderating variable,the influence of online social anxiety on problematic Internet use showed a decreasing trend.(4)Demographic variables such as gender,only child or not,,major,and family location have a significant impact on the variables in the model.