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Causes and Effects of Internet Addiction Among Students

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International Journal of Economic Sciences and Applied Research 3 (1): 49-74

Internet Addiction among Greek University Students: Demographic Associations with the Phenomenon, using the Greek version of Young’s Internet Addiction Test Christos C. Frangos1, Constantinos C. Frangos2 and Apostolos P. Kiohos3
Abstract Internet addiction (IA) is a new disorder described in 1996 by the psychologist Kimberly Young. The aim of this paper is to estimate the percentage of IA among Greek university students. Results of a sample survey among 1876 Greek university students, 18-27 years old, are presented. The questionnaire consisted of eight questions from Young’s Diagnostic Test for Internet Addiction (YDTIA) as well as an inventory including …show more content…

Although the term addiction was combined with technology in England before 1996 (Griffiths, 1995), and even earlier the term ‘computer addiction’ had been used (Shotton, 1991), IA had been mentioned only as an informal phrase by Ivan Goldberg, MD in 1995 (Federwisch, 1997; YouTube, 2008), in order to describe excessive use of the Internet. However, it was not until 1996 when the psychologist Kimberly Young gave a first serious account of this disorder, proposing diagnostic criteria and describing the collateral consequences of it on specific groups (Young, 1996a; 1998). The major objections concerning this term were in the use of the word “addiction”: although Young (1998) uses it to define the compulsiveness accompanying this disorder, Internet addiction is also accompanied with underlying maladaptive cognitions, which would be better described psychologically if the term ‘problematic Internet use’ was used (Davis, 2001; Beard and Wolf, 2001). Moreover, some researchers argue that a person’s overuse or abuse of the Internet is a behavioural manifestation of other things that may be problematic in their lives (Thatcher et al., 2008). Nevertheless, the term Internet addiction is frequently used in scholarly journals, such as CyberPsychology & Behavior and Computers in Human Behavior. In a recent attempt to meta-analyse quantitative data on IA, Byun et al. (2009, p. 204) note that the matter of the definition of IA is the first challenge to

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