In Korea, as the Internet technology has rapidly developed more than any other countries, there are not only expectations of positive effects but also increasing concerns about negative ones due to the expansion of use of the Internet. Especially as y...
In Korea, as the Internet technology has rapidly developed more than any other countries, there are not only expectations of positive effects but also increasing concerns about negative ones due to the expansion of use of the Internet. Especially as young boys and girls with great curiosity have become absorbed in the Internet due to an infinite amount of and diverse information it offers, various negative aspects are increasingly emerging, and thereby it causes them to have difficulties in carrying out important tasks for life and behavioral impediments, resulting in creating various social problems.
In this study, the researcher conducted a survey of male third graders at middle schools who are going though a chaos in their sense of self-identification more than in any other adolescence, and are in the transitional period to high schools, and also are relatively most severely addicted to the Internet. Since many previous studies placed too much emphasis on the problem of the addiction among juveniles and relied only on questionnaire surveys of them and on general affairs resulting in simply analyzing the actual state, there is lack of detailed qualitative study on fundamental causes of propensity to the addiction and related factors. In light of this, this study tried to examine the relation and effect of a sense of self-respect, parent-child relationship and peer-relationship to and on addiction to the Internet through classifying types of addiction by the self-test scale (K scale) for Korean-style Internet addiction for male third graders at middle schools and selecting subjects, and thereby wish to help to develop programs with which one can treat, control and prevent involved problems.
The results of the study on the relation and effect of a sense of self-respect, parent-child relationship and peer-relationship to and on addiction to the Internet are as below.
First, in the relation between a sense of self-respect and addiction to the Internet, the less children respect themselves in daily life, the more they become absorbed in the Internet where anonymity is guaranteed, so they can more easily express themselves and restore a sense of self-respect, and also in evaluation from others, the less children are evaluated low by their parents, the more they become addicted to the Internet due to a lowered sense of self-respect formed.
Second, in the relation between parent-child relationship and addiction to the Internet, with regard to communication between parents and the children, the less levels of acceptance of communication, parents' encouragement of communication and intimacy with parents the young boys and their parents show, the more propensity to addiction to the Internet appears, and it was revealed that when parents' attitudes toward their children are authoritative, commanding, controlling, non-accomplishing and non-reasonable, they come to cause their children to fall into addiction to the Internet.
Third, in the relation between peer-relationship and addiction to the Internet, while the Internet which is used as creating fellow-feeling and allowing communication with peer groups has a positive effect on peer-relationships, if the number of times accessing the Internet decreases, children often feel isolated among peer-groups and then they get more absorbed in the Internet to overcome repetitive feelings of anxiety and isolation which occur when not using the Internet.
When parent-children relationship is dysfunctional, children come to seek somebody to ease their loneliness and communicate with, and if that somebody is their friends and the friends' playground is the Internet, children come to have higher propensity to addiction to the Internet, and also the more children have the possibility of the addiction, the more they come to avoid friends in actual life and feel satisfaction with on-line friends.
In order to keep juveniles safe from addiction to the Internet and cultivate them soundly, the following measures are required comprehensively: first, to develop programs with which one can instruct in proper use of the Internet and enhance self-regulation for the number of times using the Internet, second, to develop and apply programs with which one can form a desirable parent-child relationship, third, to utilize peer consulting or Internet addictionpreventive programs used after school, and fourth, to develop programs with which one can prevent addictive use of the Internet before middle school students fall into the addiction and to conduct research on programs with the purpose of treating middle school students with the higher possibility of and propensity to addiction to the Internet.