Are You Addicted to Net?

As technology evolved during the past decades and internet access became more widespread and easier to get, problems also arose from such advancement in telecommunication, noticeably internet addiction. Yes, that’s right, using internet can become addictive.However, whether such addiction can be officially designated as a mental illness is still in debate. Nevertheless, there is a test that you can try for yourself to see whether you are addicted to the net, the internet addiction test.

What is Internet Addiction Test?

First of all, the internet addiction test or IAT was developed by Dr.Krimberly Young using the criteria for pathological gambling described in the Diagnostic statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (Young, K. S.). It’s a scale test that consists of 20 items and measures the severity of dependency on internet among adults (Young, K. S.).

One example of question would be:

“How often do you snap, yell or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online?”

The respondent can choose from “never” to “always” for all 20 questions which will give a score out of 100. Depending on the score, the result will range from severe addiction , with internet being a huge negative influence to person’s life, to little or no addiction which means small or no impact (Young, K. S.).

Researches on internet addiction.

Unsurprisingly, since this test was invented at the turn of century, there are numerous researches done on internet addiction using IAT in the past decade. One of them is the paper published by Laura Widyanto and Mary McMurran in 2004. They contacted people randomly using different methods, including forum post and net cafe poster, and they received 86 valid responses (Widyanto & Mcmurran, 2004). They found a negative correlation between how long participant have been using internet with total IAT score which means newer users are more likely to become addictive to internet (Widyanto & Mcmurran, 2004). This conclusion also reinforces others’ previous findings (Widyanto & Mcmurran, 2004).

Furthermore, similar studies have been conducted throughout the world. For example, the team of Kwok-kei Mak uses a modified version of the test on Chinese adolescents. They found that there is a big discrepancy between boys and girls on the risk of being addictive to internet (Lai, C et al., 2013). In their findings, boys are way more likely to suffer from problematic internet use than girls (Lai, C et al., 2013). This is consistent with some studies but not with all of them (Lai, C et al., 2013). For instance, the first paper mentioned in this blog suggests that there isn’t any significant IAT score difference across gender (Widyanto & Mcmurran, 2004).

Nevertheless, IAT is not perfect, since some questions can’t factor in present day situations, such as the widespread use of smartphone, it changes how we access the internet and how we view it. In worst scenario, IAT may no longer be valid one day, if internet become so interconnected to our life to a point where people’s daily living depends on it. This test will need constant adjustments to keep up with this ever changing world.

Reference

Widyanto, L., & Mcmurran, M. (2004). The Psychometric Properties of the Internet Addiction Test. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(4), 443–450.

Lai, C., Mak, K., Watanabe, H., Ang, R. P., Pang, J. S., & Ho, R. C. (2013). Psychometric Properties of the Internet Addiction Test in Chinese Adolescents. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 38(7), 794–807.

Young, K. S. (n.d.). IAT-Manual [DOC]. Bradford: Center for Internet Addiction Recovery.