The Study of College Students’ Internet Addiction Process

• Main Authors: Chu-Fan chung, 鍾筑凡
• Other Authors: Su-Ching Pan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35356835715695465273

碩士 === 國立臺中教育大學 === 諮商與應用心理學系碩士班 === 98 === The study is to explore the college students’ Internet addiction process. The researcher adopted semi-structured interviews of Qualitative approaches, sampled the potential interviewees from the researcher’s interpersonal network and further selected four participants who fitted interviewee’s criterion through Chen Internet Addiction Scale (CIAS). After transferring the interview content into the manuscripts verbatim, the researcher used content analysis to analyze the interview information. The results of this study are as followed: 1. College students’ Internet addiction experience (1) Most college students with history of being addicted to internet have two main addiction types – interactive relationship addiction and compulsive behavior addiction. Both of them are not for the instrumental purpose, such as working or studying. (2) The triggering factors of Internet addiction There are four triggering factors for Internet addiction. The first factor is the irreplaceable nature of the Internet such as anonymity and easy access. The second factor is personal factor: being shy, oppressed, depressed, in favor of sedentary activities, and aimless toward life. The third factor is family: parents’ attitude and lack of knowledge of internet cause children to use internet unrestrictedly. The last is peer factor: their invitation attracts the users to put more time on internet. (3) The psychological experience of Internet addiction The psychological experience of internet-addiction could be discussed from four aspects - behavior, feelings, thoughts, and influence. From the cognitive-behavioral perspective, most of the addicted college students surf the Internet as compulsive behavior. They stay up whole night and skip class as a result of excessive Internet use, and feel upset after getting off-line. When they are in the cyber space, they worry about missing messages while being off-line, going on-line without purpose, and that surfing the Internet symbolizes freedom. At last, addiction to the Internet changes the students’ social interaction, and communication types, and poor academic performance. 2. Four key forces for becoming internet addiction (1) Interpersonal problems, academic difficulties, and family problems become life pressure. Lack of friends, being cast a bad impression and evaluation, and lack of life experience force interviewees to log on to the Internet to deal with their problems. (2) The Internet meets their needs, including recreation and entertainment, emotion expression, intimacy, a sense of achievement, being trusted, ego-identity, self-fulfillment and self-transcendence. They are reinforced to get on-line more and more often. Then they move in circle of getting online to meet their needs again and again. (3) Going on-line is reinforced by game rules and interaction. The interviewees generates 8 mental mechanism such as self-challenge, immediate success, will to win, reluctance to lose, competitive attitude, curiosity, modeling, imaginary audience. All drive them to surf the Internet more often. 3. Improvement of Internet addiction of college students (1) In order to reduce the time spent on the Internet, the interviewees have made attempts to force themselves to stay away from the cyberspace, to look for alternative recreation, be regulated by parents and friends, to learning going on line efficiently, and to establish life goals. (2) Intrinsic reasons such as lack of action, perseverance, self-control, motivation to change, clarified strategies, being aimless for life, and appropriate schedule-making are the blocks in the way to reducing Internet use. In addition, new Internet activities, few chances to self fulfillment, not monitored by others are the extrinsic reasons to get interviewees to stay away from the Internet. (3) The interviewees just stopped Internet use temporarily, not quit it. The addiction became weak because of no sense of challenge, little improvement, important events, changes in game rules, finding the activity monotonous. (4) The Internet offers a learning model, enhancement in information procession, how to talk and behave in an adequate manner, self-awareness and inspiration, development in empathy, and interpersonal specialization and management in work. The above help people relive the addictive symptoms.