Internet addiction in the island of Hippocrates: the associations between internet abuse and adolescent off‐line behaviours

Abstract

Background: To investigate the phenomenon of internet addiction and concurrent social (off‐line) behaviours of an adolescent population a cross‐sectional survey of the entire adolescent student population (N = 1270, aged 14–18) of the island of Kos in Greece was conducted.Method: Completion by the survey participants of a demographic questionnaire, the 8‐question YDQ (Diagnostic Questionnaire for Internet Addiction) and the 20‐question IAT (Internet Addiction Test), followed by comparative analysis between and within usage groups.Results: Results demonstrate that 7.2% of male and 5.1% of female internet users present addictive behaviours while using the internet.Conclusions: Anti‐social, aggressive behaviours were significantly correlated with an increase to the pattern of abusive internet use in both sexes. Boys and girls had distinct profiles of off‐line and online preferences. Boys tended to favour interest‐driven online activities as their levels of addictive behaviour increased while girls favoured communication‐driven online activities.

Internet Addiction: A Systematic Review of Epidemiological Research for the Last Decade

“…The sample sizes ranged from 1,270 in Greece [71,72] to 10,988 adolescents and young adults in China, aged 13-23 years [78] The same cut-off, i.e., endorsing a minimum of five out of eight diagnostic items, has been applied to a majority of these studies. Internet addiction prevalence rates ranged from 1.7% of boys and 1.4% of girls in a representative sample of Finnish adolescents [77] to 26.4% and 26.7% at wave one and wave two in a longitudinal sample of adolescent students in Hong Kong, respectively [73].…”

“…In eleven studies, the IADQ [13] was used to assess Internet addiction in adolescents [68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]. The sample sizes ranged from 1,270 in Greece [71,72] to 10,988 adolescents and young adults in China, aged 13-23 years [78] The same cut-off, i.e., endorsing a minimum of five out of eight diagnostic items, has been applied to a majority of these studies.…”

“…Comorbid symptoms have included alcohol and substance use [47,48,51,65,66,71,74,82,86], proneness for problem behaviours [82], depression [48,50,67,68,78,81,83,87,124], suicidal ideation [124][105], ADHD [67,79,157], social phobia and phobic anxiety [79,84,87], schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder [67], psychoticism [71], and antisocial/aggressive behaviours [48,72,79,80,87]. Finally, a number of psychosomatic problems have been linked to problematic Internet use, such as a poor health condition, excessive daytime sleepiness [66], lack of energy, physiological dysfunction, weakened immunity [63], obesity, and poor vision [49].…”

The Problematic Internet Entertainment Use Scale for Adolescents: Prevalence of Problem Internet Use in Spanish High School Students

“…The first is through the score on a specific scale: for example, it is diagnosed in subjects with five of the eight diagnostic criteria on the YDQ 34,40,44,47,52,64,65 ; or on the CIAS, it is diagnosed with a minimum score of 63/64. 35,37,41,48,59 A second approach would be to extract categories using percentiles (P), such as the 75 P 24 or 95 P…”

The Relationship Between Internet Addiction and Aggression: Multiple Mediating Effects of Life Events and Social Support

“…Previous studies found that aggression behavior could be influenced by many factors, such as personal factors including personality (Luo, 2008;Denson, DeWall, & Finkel, 2012), interpersonal barriers (Ji, Wei, Chen, & Zhang, 2012), biological factors (Wang & Zhang, 2010), etc., family factors including parental rearing styles (Luo, 2008;Lv, Chen, & Wang, 2003), family environment (Lv et al, 2003;Barrett, Rapee, Dadds, & Ryan, 1996;Sijtsema, Oldehinkel, Veenstra, Verhulst, & Ormel, 2014), etc., and social factors including frustration and pressure (Taylor, & Kluemper, 2012;Riley, Watt, Richardson, & De Alwis, 2012), media violence (Fisoun, Floros, Geroukalis, Ioannidi, Farkonas, & Sergentani, 2012;Mehroof & Griffiths, 2010;Polman, De Castro, & Van Aken, 2007) addiction" of the college students is becoming more and more serious. It affects various aspects of college students' study and life (Wang & Li, 2012).…”