Vicious circle of family dysfunction and adolescent internet addiction: Do only child and non-only child exhibit differences?

Abstract

The primary aim of the current study was to probe the longitudinal relationships between family dysfunction (FD) and adolescent Internet addiction (IA), as well as the group difference between only child and non-only child. Data were from a three-wave longitudinal data of 1301 Chinese adolescents, collected when adolescents were at Grade 7, Grade 8, and Grade 9. FD and IA were assessed via adolescent self-reported questionaries of Chinese Family Assessment Instrument and Internet Addiction Test. Cross-lagged panel model was constructed to estimate possible associations between FD and adolescent IA after controlling for demographic variables. Our results suggest that adolescents might get stuck in a vicious cycle of dysfunctional family and addictive Internet use: adolescents who lived in a dysfunctional family showed increased risk in IA in the subsequent year; in turn, adolescent IA further increased the possibility of FD. Moreover, multigroup comparison analysis revealed that the vicious cycle between FD and adolescent IA could be applied to both the only child and the non-only child. The findings may enrich the application of the Developmental Contextualism Theory and contribute to the identification of the starting points for intervention strategies of adolescent IA.

Psychometric properties of the Chinese Family Assessment Instrument: evidence from mainland China

“…As such, the stability of the factor structure of the C-FAI over time was explored. It is important because the longitudinal invariant property of the C-FAI is largely neglected in previous studies using family functioning measures (e.g., Wang et al, 2021 , 2023 ; Wang X. et al, 2022 ; Zhang et al, 2023 ). Besides, apart from adopting RML estimation to address multivariate non-normality of the data, this study recruited a large sample for investigation.…”

“…This finding provides evidence for the long-term stability of the C-FAI. Please be advised that the use of C-FAI has been observed in longitudinal research conducted with teenagers in mainland China (e.g., Wang et al, 2021Wang et al, , 2023, the longitudinal invariant property of the C-FAI has not been well addressed. The strict longitudinal invariance of the C-FAI found in this study adds to the extant literature and supports the fact that the C-FAI assesses the same family functioning construct at different points of time.…”

Internet addiction and depressive symptoms in adolescents: joint trajectories and predictors

“…The study was conducted with the approval of both the Human Research Ethics Committee of the corresponding author and the administrative committees of the investigated schools. The dataset used in this study has been utilized in prior research, and has been published in several papers ( 54 , 56 , 64 ). The current study offers a novel analysis by focusing on the joint trajectories of Internet addiction and depressive symptoms, a perspective that differs both methodologically and theoretically from our earlier work.…”

“…Extensive research has been conducted to examine potential disparities in psychological and behavioral development between children raised in single-child households and those from families with multiple children (51)(52)(53). Research has demonstrated that there are significant differences in Internet addiction (54) and depressive symptoms (34) between only children and non-only children in the Chinese adolescent population. Furthermore, given the importance of family as a source of emotional support and emotional warmth for adolescents, it should be no surprise that healthy family function has been verified to be a prominent protective factor against adolescents' Internet addiction (55) and depressive symptoms (56).…”