Adolescents’ Interpersonal Relationships with Friends, Parents, and Teachers When Using Facebook for Interaction

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate the adolescents' interpersonal relationships with friends, parents, and teachers when using Facebook for interaction. A total of 740 junior high school students were invited to fill in a questionnaire and 673 questionnaires were available. Data were analyzed using one-way analy-sis of variance and paired-samples t-test. The analytic result confirms that adolescents with high fre-quency use of Facebook for interactions can expand their interpersonal relationships with friends than those who with low frequency use, regardless of real-life or virtual relationships. However, their real-life interpersonal relationships with parents may weaken if overly use Internet tools for interactions. Another finding, eliminating the factor of the time on Facebook use, reveals that the adolescents' real-life inter-personal relationships are stronger than virtual interpersonal relationships, regardless of with friends, parents, and teachers. Combining the above two findings, it is worth noting that the real-life interaction with parents may reduce if overly use Internet tools for interactions. This study contributes to the litera-ture by investigating the adolescents' relationships with friends, parents and teachers and indicates the potential program when adolescents using Facebook use for interaction. This study, thus, further recom-mends that parents should be concerned their children about Facebook use.