Self-Esteem and Internet Addiction among Late Adolescents and Young Adults

Internet is now a days counted as digital addiction. The youth has a hunger to know about new things and internet is the cheapest and easiest way to satisfy the hunger. Internet surfing is very easy and it soothes the curiosity within seconds. Slowly internet is now become a necessary portion of our lives. People started searching relationships on social networking sites particularly when they are poor or weak in building relationships, poor in communication or expression or are hesitant of social speech. Therefore, it seems that lack of social skill and self-esteem could be one cause of spending longer time on the internet. With this view point, current study was designed to reconnoiter the relationship among web addiction and self-esteem. It was hypothesized that lower the self-esteem higher would be the internet addiction. To fulfill the purpose of this study self-esteem test by Rosenberg and internet addiction test by Kimberly young were applied on a sample of 300 subjects selected from various educational institutions in Haryana on the basis of consent to participate in the study. The subjects were in the age range of 16-25 years, representing a mixed gender, rural-urban and different socio-economic status. On the basis of consent to participate in the study from Haryana were selected. Pearson's Correlation method was used to study the data and the hypothesis predicting that lower the self-esteem higher would be the internet addiction proved. It is recommended that raising self-esteem should help in lowering the addiction.