Why Are Turkish University Students Addicted to the Internet? A Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

Internet addiction has become a significant problem that primarily affects young people. It has an essential effect on the individual’s self-perception and assessment of their competencies. This study aimed to reveal whether there is a significant relationship between the level of internet addiction of university students and their age and self-esteem. For this purpose, internet addiction and self-esteem scales were used in addition to questions such as age, gender, the purpose of internet use, and internet daily usage time. We used a quantitative research method to obtain cross-sectional data from 400 Turkish young people using online surveys. Correlation, regression, mediation, and moderation analyses were performed using SPSS and the PROCESS macro plugin for data analysis. Internet addiction was significantly associated with self-esteem, gender, age, and daily internet usage. In addition, we discovered that self-esteem and daily usage time played a mediation role in the effect of the age variable on internet addiction. Moreover, the moderation roles of social networks, gender, and location in the impact of self-esteem on internet addiction were determined. With this study, we understood that as age increases, self-esteem triggers the decrease of internet addiction. In this sense, policies should be developed to increase self-esteem among young people to ensure the conscious use of the internet.

Internet Addiction Amongst University Students Under COVID-19: Prevalence and Correlates

“…Interestingly, the present study found no gender difference in students' scores of IA which is not consistent with many of the existing findings indicating male students tend to have a higher level of IA than female students (e.g., Anand et al, 2018;Bhandari et al, 2017;Salehi et al, 2014). Some scholars argued that the non-significant association between gender and IA may be due to the reason that the influence of gender was influenced by other demographic variables (Kocak et al, 2021) and other factors such as cultural and community values (Khan et al, 2017). Therefore, more studies should be conducted in the future to understand the interacting effect of gender with other demographic factors such as culture.…”

Mediating Role of Satisfaction with Life in the Effect of Self-Esteem and Education on Social Media Addiction in Turkey

“…Consistent with the results of our study, it was determined in the literature that the age variable has a positive association with self-esteem and satisfaction with life. In contrast, it has a negative correlation with the internet and social media addiction [86][87][88][89][90][91][92]. However, in the literature, it was seen that the use of the internet and social media by the elderly to spend time, socialize, shop, and find old friends have been increasing [93,94].…”

Self-Directed Learning of Malay Undergraduate Students

“…participants showing lower levels of self-determination. Furthermore, Koçak et al (2021) found in a large-scale study that there is an age-related increase in self-esteem, which can be linked to SDL. The study also found that males tend to have higher self-esteem than females.…”