Internet Addiction Among Under-Graduate and Post-Graduate Students

ABSTRACT ::

To evaluate explore the impact of gender and education level in internet addiction. The participants were 160 students in the different collages and university departments in Rajkot city, Internet Addiction Scale by Young(1998). The results demonstrated that male student more internets addicted than female student and under graduate student more internets addicted than post-graduate student.

Introduction : -

The explosive growth of the internet in the last decade has had a huge impact on communication and interpersonal behavior. Psychological research during the same period has sought to increase understanding of this impact. The internet was originally designed to facilitate communication and research activities.

Many campuses are now finding that a student culture is being created via E-mail, Web surfing, multiple user dungeons(MUDS; interactive, role-playing games), and homepage production. Many students provide E-mail addresses as the preferred mode of contact rather than telephone numbers. Although the Internet can be a powerful tool for both academic study and personal communication. Pathological or problematic use of the Internet, also called "Internet addiction," is a behavior pattern that appears to be affecting more and more people, including students.

Weiser (2000) gave an extensive review and executed a study on gender differences in Internet use patterns and Internet application preferences in a sample of 1190 surveys. He concluded that there were numerous gender differences in preferences for specific Internet applications. Results had shown that men use the Internet mainly for purposes related to entertainment and leisure, whereas women use it primarily for interpersonal communication and educational assistance. However, additional analyses showed that several gender differences were mediated by differences in age and Internet experience. His results were in accordance with many previous results which had shown mainly that women were less familiar with the use of the Internet(Georgia Tech GVU WWW survey,1994), suggesting at some period that men comprised 95% of Internet users and women just 5%. Explanations for this gender gap have been given and rely on gender differences in self-efficacy and attitudes toward computers(Busch,1995).

Objectives ::

To explore the impact of gender and education level in internet addiction.

Methods:

Sample
The present study was conducted on a sample of 160 students in which 80 were male and remaining 80 were girls. They were studying in the different collages and university departments in Rajkot city during the 2009-2010 academic years: Thus, the sample consisted of under-graduate and post-graduate students.

Measure of Internet Addiction
The Internet Addiction Scale (IAS) was a modified version of that of Young (1998). This scale examines the degree of preoccupation, compulsive use, behavioral problems, emotional changes, and impact on life related to internet usage. The 20 items of the IAS are calibrated scores ranging from 1 to 5 (given a total score ranging from 20 to 100), with higher scores reflecting a greater tendency toward addiction. The internal consistency (Cronbach’s a coefficient) of the IAS was 0.90 in the study of Lee et al. (2001). In the current sample (N = 1,573), Cronbach’s a coefficient was 0.92.

Results and discussion