Examination of High School Students’ Internet Addiction In Terms Of Some Variables

Abstract

Developing technology and science bring about many of the problems in individual and social life as a result of wrong perception and usage, while they significantly make human life easier. Internet addiction is one of the problems dealt at scientific researches and needing to be solved. Addiction is a psychological-based problem and causes lots of problems such as social, economical and physical. Education is the first to struggle with this problem. It is important for the struggle to be effective to diagnose the problem and determine what level the problem is and which variables it is related to. This study is about the analysis of high school students’ internet addiction in terms of some variables. The study is a descriptive and quantitative research carried out in survey model. It was researched on 969 students who are at high school in the city center of Kırşehir, Turkey. 490 of the students are female while 479 of them are male. 536 of the students are at Vocational High School, 244 of them are at Anatolian High School and 189 of them are at General High School. “Personal Information Form” and “Internet Addiction Scale”, which was developed by Young (1998) and adapted to Turkish by Bayraktar (2001), were used as data collection tools. The scale consists of 20 items and a single dimension. For reliability of the scale, Cronbach’s Alpha was determined as 0,91. Arithmetic mean, standard deviation, t test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test, Scheffé/Tamhane test and correlation test were used for data analysis. The results were summarized in tables form and explained under the tables. At the end of the research, these results were mainly reached: (1) Students are “potential internet addicts”. (2) Males compared to females, Anatolian High School students compared to Vocational and General High Schools students, 9th grade students compared to 11th grade students, the ones having internet at home compared to the ones who don’t, the students attending a computer course compared to the students who didn’t, the students using internet for fun and communication compared to the others are more addicted to internet with a meaningful difference. On the other hand, while there is a positive and meaningful relation between internet addiction level and internet usage frequency and experience, there is no relation between internet addiction level and academic standings of students. In other words, as long as students’ Internet usage frequency and experience increases, their addiction level increases, too. Within these results, some suggestions were made to struggle with internet addiction at high schools.