Teens' Behavior Patterns on the Web: Surfing or Wrecking?

Abstract

Adolescents’ relationship with technology is controversial both because of the possibilities it offers and because of the risks it entails, even being perceived by them as a real need. In order to improve the knowledge about it, a non-experimental research of transversal style has been carried out using a methodology based on data mining. 1,048 students of Secondary Education participated and answered a questionnaire about their use of the Internet and social networks. Six factors were indentified, which could be recognized as patterns of behavior in the network. They are grouped around: (1) the communicative and informative dimension of the resources; (2) the one related to the security in the network; (3) the risk and vulnerability; (4) the specialized information both general and specific, (5) the transfer and acquisition of goods; and (6) the leisure and parental surveillance. The main findings show that their habits are mostly oriented towards the transfer and transaction along with the maintenance of security, avoinding situations that could involve risk and vulnerability in navigation. The identification of these subgroups is timely in order to develop training and digital literacy actions.