Médiation parentale dans les pratiques d’écran et construction identitaire chez les adolescents de 12 à 18 ans

Abstract

The present study entitled: "Parental mediation in screen practices and identity construction among adolescents aged 12 to 18 ", poses the problem of identity construction in the era of cyber culture among the adolescent layer by questioning the influence that parental mediation strategies have on screen practices. Indeed, it has been noted with great bitterness that young people are in a sort of “in-between”, lost in an environment with plural demands. Also, today they are no longer able to get rid of the virtual world and engage in other activities different from those in which they invest. For this, the objective which served as a basis for this work is to verify the existing link between parental mediation in screen practices and identity construction among adolescents aged 12 to 18. Based on contextualist (Brofenbrenner, 1979), social constructivist (Vygotsky, 1963) and Bandura’s social learning theories. Without forgetting that of identity construction (Erikson, 1968; Marcia 1976), we postulated that there exists a certain number of variables (active mediation, co-use mediation, restrictive mediation, supervision mediation, mediation by technical restrictions) which would be linked to the process of identity construction during adolescence. From there, five specific hypotheses emerged, and were tested under the prism of a questionnaire designed to measure what we intend to demonstrate, and this on a total of 161 preferentially selected adolescents (78 boys and 83 girls) in establishments in the city of Yaoundé and Bafoussam (Don Bosco College and Tanyim Technical High School). Thus, the results obtained indicate that the data collected supports our hypotheses, because our five specific hypotheses were pleasantly confirmed. After interpretation of said results, numerous theoretical perspectives and possible impacts emerge in the field of research in the African and Cameroonian context, the economy of which allows us to note that there is a strong causal relationship between parental mediation in screen practices and identity construction during adolescence. Hence the need for psychologists to promote therapeutic approaches linked to this new influencing variable (screens) which has a strong impact on the construction of human individuality.