Identity profile of young people experiencing a sense of risk on the internet: a data mining application of decision tree with CHAID algorithm

Abstract

[EN]Social media, interactive games, and digital platforms are just some of the ways in which the internet has become part of our lives, and more specifically so among young people. Among other things, this technology is the reason young people are spending increasingly more time online than offline, prompting numerous risks that they are sometimes unaware of. The following quantitative research is based on this premise, and it pursues two objectives, namely, to discover whether or not young people experience a sense of risk linked to their use of the internet and identify the kind of young people that say they do or do not perceive any such risk. A total of 1991 young people answered the Technology Use Studies questionnaire. The classification tree technique based on the Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) was applied to identify the predictive variables associated with the sense of risk in young people. Two highly significant results have been forthcoming: firstly, we present the factors with the biggest impact on a young person's internet-related sense of risk, involving isolation when they cannot go online, followed by variables such as gender, the use of TikTok, and videogames, the consumption of pornography, and distraction from study time. Secondly, our results indicate that the young people that feel isolated when they cannot go online are precisely the ones that do not experience a sense of online risk. It is therefore of vital importance for education to generate and provide young people with strategies that allow them to establish a healthy and responsible relationship with technologies such as the internet.