The Study of the Relationship between Internet skills and internet opportunities among Students in Shiraz City

Children and adolescents are using mobile and internet technology in their daily lives to an extent unprecedented in the social history of technology dissemination. The inevitability of using the internet has made it necessary to address the issue of internet opportunities in the field of research and policymaking. This paper is an attempt to study the relationship between internet skills and adolescents' benefit from internet opportunities. The study's statistical population included all male and female secondary school students in Shiraz, and the respondents were selected using the cluster random sampling technique. The sample size of 844 subjects was determined using Cochran's formula with a 98% confidence interval and 4% error. Ultimately, 869 students completed the online questionnaire. Descriptive results indicated that, in order, adolescents benefited most from social communication, recreation, and entertainment opportunities, but benefited least from online opportunities for civic-political participation and creativity. In terms of the various types of internet skills, the highest and lowest mean scores were related to operational and information skills, respectively. The inferential results revealed that all types of internet skills had a positive and significant effect on all internet opportunities. The correlation between the variable of total skills and total opportunities (r = 0.483) showed a moderate, positive relationship. Our findings confidently suggest that the benefit of adolescents from internet opportunities can be maximized by increasing their internet skills and literacy.