Social Exclusion and Problematic Use of Internet Among College Students:The Mediating Role of Materialism

A questionnaire survey was conducted among 339 college students to investigate the relationships among social exclusion, materialism and Problematic Internet Use (PIU) .The results showed that: (1) There exists gender difference in terms of social exclusion, with a significantly higher level of social exclusion being detected in boys than girls.Differences in terms of materialism are found to exist chiefly between only-children and non-only-children, between children of different graders as well as between families of different incomes; (2) Both social exclusion and materialism can positively predict PIU; (3) materialism plays partly a role in explaining the relationship between social exclusion and PIU.These results suggest that the More social exclusion college students receive, the stronger materialistic values they would develop, and the more probably a higher level of PIU will be found among them.