The purpose of this study is to examine the prevalence of internet addiction and internet pornography addiction among adolescents and then find out the factors (psycho-social, internet use environment, peer, family) affecting on the adolescents' inter...
The purpose of this study is to examine the prevalence of internet addiction and internet pornography addiction among adolescents and then find out the factors (psycho-social, internet use environment, peer, family) affecting on the adolescents' internet addiction and pornography addiction. The questionnaire was composed of questions for socio-demographic information and various scales including Internet Addiction Scale, Pornography Addiction Scale by Young, Self-Esteem Scale by Rosenberg, CPIC, UCLA Loneliness Scale, Friends Relation Scale etc. The survey was carried out with 900 students (815 responded and 790 responses were effective) from 2 middle schools and 6 high schools located in Chuncheon city, Gangwon-do.
The major results about internet addiction among adolescents are as follows : (1) Ages when students began to use internet become younger for both male and female students; (2) 35.4% of adolescents had mild addiction while 2.2% of adolescents had severe addiction; (3) adolescents who used internet for online-game or pornography showed a higher score in Young's internet addiction scale; (4) In the regression analysis, self-esteem, daily internet use hours by friends, gender(male), Parental conflict were the factors affecting significantly on adolescent internet addiction.
The major results about internet pornography addiction among adolescents are as follows : (1) Ages when students viewed the internet pornography for the first time become younger for both male and female students, while that of females is younger than males ; (2) 53.8% of students fall to 'severly addicted level'; (3) Adolescents who viewed visual materials compared to pictures, novels, and cartoons reported the higher scores while high school male students (80.5%) reported the highest scores in Young's Pornography Scale compared to other groups ; (4) In the regression analysis, gender (male), grade, loneliness and parental confliect were the factors affecting significantly on the adolescent pornography addiction.
Several suggestions to intervene for the internet addiction and pornography addiction among adolescents were made as follows : (1) It is necessary to plan early prevention programs for children and their parents based upon the continuous study on the change of children's internet use and unique developmental aspects of children ; (2) It is important to develop recreational, cultural, sport programs doing with the real-world friends in school and community which will meet the needs of adolescents who otherwise will find the alternative fun from the cyber world; (3) It will be necessary to develop visual educational programs which will help adolescents to critically distinguish the visual cultural works and pornographic materials.