Refueling Mental Health: Digital Reading Predicts Psychological Resilience for Left‐behind Children in Rural China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Beyond the easy and equal access to massive online contents, will digital reading bring more social welfare values for disadvantaged groups? Take left‐behind children (LBC) in rural China as example, whose mental health issue has widely aroused public concern. Lacking of sufficient parental supervision and educational resources leads to insufficient development of psychological resilience and makes them vulnerable to mental health problems. As psychological resilience is a critical protective factor for maintaining mental health, in this paper, we wonder whether digital reading could perform as an alternative way with easy accessibility and numerous resources to supplement LBC's resilience development. We conducted a field questionnaire study on LBC (N = 217) and investigated the predictive effect of digital reading on psychological resilience. After controlling sociodemographic variables and common resilience protective factors, hierarchical regression results demonstrated that digital reading predicted an additional 4.3% of the variation in resilience above the control variables, indicating digital reading a positive promoter of LBC's psychological resilience. Moreover, by systematically exploring the fine‐grained digital reading variables, we also found intrinsic motivation to read and recreational digital reading (e.g., reading comics and communicating online) to be the two most stronger predictors of psychological resilience.