Investigating the differential effects of social networking site addiction and Internet gaming disorder on psychological health

Abstract

Background and aimsPrevious studies focused on examining the interrelationships between social networking site (SNS) addiction and Internet gaming disorder (IGD) in isolation. Moreover, little is known about the potential simultaneous differential effects of SNS addiction and IGD on psychological health. This study investigated the interplay between these two technological addictions and ascertained how they can uniquely and distinctively contribute to increasing psychiatric distress when accounting for potential effects stemming from sociodemographic and technology-related variables.MethodsA sample of 509 adolescents (53.5% males) aged 10–18 years (mean = 13.02, SD = 1.64) were recruited.ResultsIt was found that key demographic variables can play a distinct role in explaining SNS addiction and IGD. Furthermore, it was found that SNS addiction and IGD can augment the symptoms of each other, and simultaneously contribute to deterioration of overall psychological health in a similar fashion, further highlighting potentially common etiological and clinical course between these two phenomena. Finally, the detrimental effects of IGD on psychological health were found to be slightly more pronounced than those produced by SNS addiction, a finding that warrants additional scientific scrutiny.Discussion and conclusionThe implications of these results are further discussed in light of the existing evidence and debates regarding the status of technological addictions as primary and secondary disorders.

Individual Differences and the Development of Internet Addiction

“…Taken together, these findings could potentially illustrate common clinical course and shared etiology between different types of addictive behaviors. Furtherly, these results lend support to previous studies suggesting some underlying common risk factors between several technological addictions and related behaviors (Andreassen et al, 2016;Grant, Potenza, Weinstein, & Gorelick, 2010;Pontes, 2017;Robbins & Clark, 2015) and provide context to further understand why empirical studies often report positive associations between various addictive technological behaviors (Andreassen et al, 2016;Király et al, 2014;Pontes, 2017).…”

Psychometric validation of the Turkish nine-item Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short Form (IGDS9-SF)

“…Petry et al (2014) suggested that "establishing the psychometric properties of instruments assessing these nine [IGD] criteria should begin using a cross-cultural perspective", and because gaming behavior may differ across cultures, studies examining the psychometric properties of the IGDS9-SF in distinct countries around the world are needed ). This notion is partly supported by a recent study on the IGDS9-SF that investigated the cross-cultural feasibility of the scale across gamers from the United States of America (USA), India, and the United Kingdom (UK) (Pontes et al, 2017). Although the one-factor structure of the IGD construct was supported, crosscountry variations were demonstrated and reflected on IGD items assessing preoccupation/salience, tolerance, deception, gaming escapism/mood modification, as well as daily activities' impairment related to gaming.…”

“…Based on the approach utilized by previous research using the IGDS9-SF (e.g., de Palo et al, 2018;Gomez et al, 2018;Pontes, 2017;Stavropoulos et al, 2018), participants' answers to the IGDS9-SF items as (5) "very often" were operationalized as endorsement of a criterion. Thus, the prevalence of potential IGD was about 0.96% (n = 12) for the whole sample and around 2.57% (n = 8) among esports gamers.…”

“…Although a relatively high number of standardized assessment tools to assess IGD have been recently developed, the IGDS9-SF, which was developed to be utilized in large-scale surveys, has been extensively utilized in several countries and employed in a number of research studies given its excellent psychometric properties and conciseness to assess IGD in time-limited research. More specifically, the IGDS9-SF has been developed and adapted to different languages, such as: English (Pontes and Griffiths, 2015 ;Pontes et al, 2017), Slovenian , Portuguese , Italian (Monacis et al, 2016), and Persian (Wu et al, 2017). Although these international studies utilizing the IGDS9-SF have not directly estimated mean scores of IGD across different populations investigated due to their exclusive psychometric focus, these studies have provided key insights on the diagnosis and measurement of IGD.…”

Problematic gaming behaviour and health-related outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Several reviews and empirical studies investigating the psychometric assessment of IGD were conducted (see King et al, 2013;Pontes andGriffiths, 2014, 2015b). Due to the ongoing debate and unofficial…”