Objective: the increasing importance in human development and in everyday life could lead adolescents to a new discussed psychopathology, characterized by multiple risk factors and comorbidities: Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). The aim of this work is to evaluate the prevalence of the disease in an Italian adolescent sample, to focus on risk factors in youth, to test psychological functioning in addicted and at-risk subjects and to try out the sensibility of current assessment tools. Method: 1483 Italian high school students, aged 14 – 21 years (M=16; SD=1.5), mainly men (63%), were asked to answer socio-demographic and Internet-use questions and to fill out the following tests: Internet Addiction Test (IAT; Young, 1998), The Multidimensional test of self-esteem (TMA; Bracken 1992) and Youth Self Report (YSR; Achenbach 1991). Results: the prevalence of the IAD is consistent with the literature (1.2%), but at-risk range is much wider than in other studies (49%). Correlation analysis highlighted associations between IAT scores and TMA and YSR scores (p<.001). ANCOVA analysis showed that low self-esteem, age, connection time and some YSR subscales (mostly thought problems) perform best in predicting IAT scores. Conclusions: Internet abuse seems to be connected to different kind of psychological distress in adolescence. The current questionnaires are able to identify high psychopathological subjects but fail to discriminate among at-risk subjects.
Category: No 2 - June - 2013
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