Pleasant Life Online and Offline: Implications for Understanding College Students’ Virtual Lives

This study compares the online and offline pleasant life of college students in Taiwan. To achieve this goal, this study develops a Positive Psychology Scale (PPS) and Cyberspace Positive Psychology Scale(C-PPS) and administers them to a sample of 411 college students in Taiwan. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was utilized to test the construct validity of the PPS and CPPS, and the paired t-test was used to investigate the difference between the PPS and C-PPS scores. The results of CFA show that the PLS and C-PLS measurement tools in this study show good reliability and validity. Analytical results also show that life satisfaction (pleasant life about the past) online is higher than that offline. However, the offline scores for positive emotion (pleasant life about the present) and optimism (pleasant life about the future) are higher than the online scores. The analytical results verify that virtual life is not only part of, but even the better part of, daily life for college students. Albeit, college students experience more positive emotion and more optimistic offline than online. .