The present study attempts to examine the relationship between online communication and subjective well-being from the perspective of psychological need satisfaction, as well as the mediating role of shyness and social self-efficacy among Chinese college students. 574 college students with average age of 20 were asked to complete Psychological Need for Online Communication Scale, Shyness Scale, Social Self-efficacy Scale and Subjective Well-being Scale. SEM evidence supports the stimulation hypothesis, namely, the psychological needs satisfied by online communication can promote a person’s social self-efficacy and experience a higher evaluation of subjective well-being. Meanwhile, the psychological needs satisfied by online communication can also influence individuals’ status of shyness, which will decrease their social self-efficacy and lead to a lower subjective well-being. Furthermore, Chinese female college students obtain less social self-efficacy from the satisfaction of psychological needs through online communication than their male counterparts did, and resulted in less subjective well-being. The results are discussed in terms of psychological needs theory.
Online communication is becoming increasingly common in college students (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005). According to the Thirtieth Statistical Report on Internet Development from the China Internet Network Information Center, there are 445 million Chinese people who are using online communication, accounting for 82.8% of all Internet users, and more than 30% of them are college students. Researchers pay more attention to the influences of online communication to peoples’ real life, such as relationship formation (McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002), interpersonal trust (Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009), information sharing (Butler, 2001), interpersonal trust (Valenzuela et al., 2009) and social adaption (Engelberg & Sjöberg, 2004), especially for subjective well-being (Kim and Lee, 2011 and Schiffrin et al., 2010), but the results were controversial.
The purpose of this study is to examine whether psychological need satisfaction can explain the relationship between online communication and the subjective well-being of Chinese college students. Based on the use and gratification theory and the self-determination theory, the present study supposed that the satisfaction of psychological needs in online communication can promote the subjective well-being. Moreover, shyness and social self-efficacy may mediate the relationship between them. We applied the structure equation modeling (SEM) approach to assess the empirical strength of the relationships in the proposed model, and then use multi-group analysis to identify if the results would vary across gender.
This study includes 5 sections: Section 2 provides a literature review and research hypotheses; Section 3 describes the research method; Section 4 presents the results of data analysis. Finally, Section 5 makes the discussions and conclusions, and also presents limitations and implications for further researchers.