TY - JOUR
T1 - Relationships between digital leisure and happiness among international students during the COVID-19 pandemic
T2 - examining a mediation model
AU - Chang, Liang Chih
AU - Dattilo, John
AU - Huang, Fei Hsin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - Digital leisure may help international students experience happiness during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is unclear how digital leisure promotes happiness. To address this area of limited research, we identified social support from contexts of digital leisure as digital leisure social support (DLSS) and divided DLSS into digital leisure emotional support (DLES) and digital leisure instrumental support (DLIS) as well as examined relationships among DLES, DLIS, hope, and happiness. A total of 282 international students who attended a private university participated in this study. We used in-person surveys to measure DLES, DLIS, hope, and happiness. We conducted structural equation modelling to analyse the data. Results indicated that high levels of DLES predicted high levels of hope; high levels of hope predicted high levels of happiness; and high levels of DLES predicted high levels of happiness in the mediation model. However, DLIS did not correlate with hope and happiness. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of promoting happiness among international students during these challenging times.
AB - Digital leisure may help international students experience happiness during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is unclear how digital leisure promotes happiness. To address this area of limited research, we identified social support from contexts of digital leisure as digital leisure social support (DLSS) and divided DLSS into digital leisure emotional support (DLES) and digital leisure instrumental support (DLIS) as well as examined relationships among DLES, DLIS, hope, and happiness. A total of 282 international students who attended a private university participated in this study. We used in-person surveys to measure DLES, DLIS, hope, and happiness. We conducted structural equation modelling to analyse the data. Results indicated that high levels of DLES predicted high levels of hope; high levels of hope predicted high levels of happiness; and high levels of DLES predicted high levels of happiness in the mediation model. However, DLIS did not correlate with hope and happiness. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of promoting happiness among international students during these challenging times.
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U2 - 10.1080/02614367.2023.2264523
DO - 10.1080/02614367.2023.2264523
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85173523268
SN - 0261-4367
VL - 43
SP - 677
EP - 691
JO - Leisure Studies
JF - Leisure Studies
IS - 4
ER -