The aim

The aim of this research is to cross-culturally examine the longitudinal relationships between school-aged children’s Internet use, parenting practices, and children’s socioemotional problems vs adaptive adjustment in Latvia, Lithuania, and Taiwan. A comparison of these variables in all three countries with marked sociocultural variations, for example, collectivism vs individualism values, allows the opportunity to examine relationships between sociocultural, familial, and child’s effects.

Project is supported by Mutual Funds between the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Lithuania, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Latvia and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Lithuanian research is funded by Research Council of Lithuania and MOST, contract no. S-LLT-18-3, year 2018 – 2020.

Main research questions are:

1. What are the associations (and predictive effects longitudinally over one-year period) between child Internet use and child’s socioemotional / behavioral problems or adjustment? 

2. What are the associations (predictive and / or moderating effects) between child Internet use and family demographic characteristics, family values, parenting practices, including parental monitoring of Internet use? Also, what is the moderating effect of parenting practices on the relationship between child Internet use and socioemotional difficulties? 

3. What are the differences and similarities in these associations between the findings from Latvia, Lithuania and Taiwan – and what are the implications of the effect of the sociocultural context?

Participants

Participants are about 300 school aged children and their parents from each country. 309 children and their parents from several schools in Vilnius have participated in the first stage of the project in Lithuania. 

We thank all children and their parents, as well as the administrations of the schools for participation and great contribution to the study.