TY - JOUR
T1 - Longitudinal impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on adolescent internet use
T2 - Analysis from a cohort study of taiwanese youths
AU - Tsai, Meng Che
AU - Strong, Carol
AU - Chen, Wan Ting
AU - Lee, Chih Ting
AU - Lin, Chung Ying
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was supported by the research grant awarded to CT Lee from the National Cheng Kung University Hospital (NCKUH-100503004). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Tsai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - Aim To investigate the longitudinal impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on Internet use in adolescents. Methods Three waves of data on a longitudinal cohort of 7th grade students (N = 2430) were retrieved from the Taiwan Youth Project. Univariate and multivariate regression models were applied using crude and adjusted odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) to examine the concomitant impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on adolescent Internet use. Results The dataset identified 210 (8.7%) students using the Internet for more than 20 hours/week, and 81 (3.3%) were viewing pornographic material online. Early maturing and thin-weight adolescents were at 35% and 46% increased risks of spending long hours on Internet use, respectively. While early puberty was associated with online pornography viewing among males (adjusted OR 1.84, 95% CI 1.04–3.28), early puberty was contrarily a protective factor against online gaming in females (adjusted OR 0.59, 95% CI 0.36–0.96). Conclusion Early puberty was found to be positively related to adolescent Internet use. Appropriate health education and guidance regarding Internet use should be provided to those with different developing needs.
AB - Aim To investigate the longitudinal impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on Internet use in adolescents. Methods Three waves of data on a longitudinal cohort of 7th grade students (N = 2430) were retrieved from the Taiwan Youth Project. Univariate and multivariate regression models were applied using crude and adjusted odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) to examine the concomitant impacts of pubertal timing and weight status on adolescent Internet use. Results The dataset identified 210 (8.7%) students using the Internet for more than 20 hours/week, and 81 (3.3%) were viewing pornographic material online. Early maturing and thin-weight adolescents were at 35% and 46% increased risks of spending long hours on Internet use, respectively. While early puberty was associated with online pornography viewing among males (adjusted OR 1.84, 95% CI 1.04–3.28), early puberty was contrarily a protective factor against online gaming in females (adjusted OR 0.59, 95% CI 0.36–0.96). Conclusion Early puberty was found to be positively related to adolescent Internet use. Appropriate health education and guidance regarding Internet use should be provided to those with different developing needs.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0197860
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0197860
M3 - Article
C2 - 29795649
AN - SCOPUS:85047496613
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 13
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 5
M1 - e0197860
ER -