Digital Citizenship and Life Satisfaction in South Korean Adolescents: The Moderated Mediation Effect of Poverty

Abstract

This study examined the moderated mediation effect of poverty on the paths between enactive mastery experience in digital life and life satisfaction mediated by digital citizenship and digital life among Korean adolescents using structural equation modelling. This cross-sectional study involved a secondary data analysis of 2020 national data in The Report on the Digital Divide provided by the National Information Society Agency (NIA) of Korea. Data from 1084 Korean adolescents were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 26.0 and SPSS PROCESS macro. The results demonstrated a significant moderated mediation effect of poverty. Enactive mastery experience, which encompasses the self-knowledge, perceived task difficulty, and contextual factors of adolescents living in poverty, was associated with digital life and life satisfaction through the mediation of digital citizenship. For adolescents living in poverty, in contrast to their non-poor counterparts, enactive mastery experience in digital life and digital citizenship are two critical factors in life satisfaction. Therefore, institutional support enabling adolescents and their communities to forge partnerships is necessary to foster these two factors.