Psychosocial Correlates of Internet Addiction among University Students

The advent of the internet has dramatically changed our life, positively as well as negatively. Internet addiction is one such negative consequence of it. The present study aims at exploring how personality, loneliness, and affect (positive & negative) predict internet addiction among University students. Four psychological tools were used to measure the variables taken in the study. Internet addiction was measured by Online Cognition Scale (OCS), Personality was measured by Eysenck's MPI (Short), Loneliness was measured by UCLA Loneliness Scale (UCLA-LS), and affect was measured by PANAS. Cronbach's alpha of these scales on the present sample was: OCS (0.88), UCLA-LS (0.79), PANAS (Negative Affect 0.68, Positive Affect 0.77), and MPI (Extraversion 0.33, Neuroticism 0.58). Data were collected from a sample size of 182 participants of undergraduate and postgraduate classes. They are between the age group of 18 to 25 years. Their mean age is 19.76 years. Multiple correlation indicate a significant correlation (0.34, p<0.001) among all the variables chosen in the study and all the predictors explained significant variance in the internet addiction. Loneliness and Negative Affect emerged as the significant predictors of internet addiction in the present study.