Online knowledge sharing and psychological well-being among Chinese college students

Abstract

This survey study examines the relationship of online knowledge sharing and psychological well-being among undergraduate students in Hong Kong. A self-reported paper questionnaire was administered to a sample of 489 undergraduate students aged 17-25 from a local university. Online Knowledge Sharing Behavior (OKSB; Ma & Yuen, 2011) was adopted to measure the online communication of knowledge. There were two measures for psychological well-being - Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985) and Flourishing Scale (FS; Diener et al., 2010). Although the structural equation modeling (SEM) results showed online knowledge sharing significantly predicted life satisfaction and flourishing, it only accounted for very little variation in life satisfaction (1.3%) and flourishing (3.1%). The findings suggested that the positive effect of online knowledge sharing on psychological well-being has to be further investigated.