The investigation of relationship between computer addiction with depression and anxiety of children

The principle purpose of this research will be to examine how depression and anxiety in children can be a result of computer addiction. The study group consists of 395 secondary school students in Istanbul; 218 of them female and 177 of them male students. To measure the variables in the study, each child is given forms to complete; the forms given are Personal Information Form, Computer Dependancy Scale for Children, Anxiety and Depression Scale for Children. The study will first analyse the demographic variables in computer addiction. For the statistical analysis of the variables in the study, t test, Analysis of Oneway Variance (ANOVA), Tukey Test, Pearson Momentum Product Correlation Technique (LSD) and finally the Pearson Correlation Test was conducted. The results from the analysis conducted in the T Test show that there is a significant relationship between the gender variations and their computer dependency. It shows that the male students are highly more addictive to the computer than their female counterparts. There is also another important relationship evident in the test which is the child's class year and their computer addiction. This means the higher the year the child is in, the computer addiction is increased. The T test that examined the parents marital status showed that this also had a significant affect on how much the child uses the computer. It is evident here that children who's parents are separated have a higher tendency to be addicted to the computer in relation to the children who's parents are together. Another major relationship, evident in the results of the T Test, is between the students academic achievement and their computer addiction. The children with academic achievement results of 70 - 84.9 have higher computer addiction levels compared to the children with results of 85 - 100. There are no other major differences found in any other comparisons. It has also been examined whether there is any difference between how much a child uses the computer and their computer addiction scores; results of this shows that the higher usage level of the computer increases the computer addiction rate of the child. Another comparison studies the variance between computer games and the child's computer addiction scores; it is evident in the results that the more the participant played computer the games the greater the computer addiction becomes. The results of the test also shows that the economic background of the child made no difference in their computer addiction scores. Furthermore, the second phase of the study tested the relationship between the participants computer addiction and their depression and anxiety levels. The analysis of the test shows that there is a positive correlation between the computer addiction of the child and their depression scores. Therefore, this suggests, that the greater computer addiction level increases the depression score of the child. Finally, the analysis of anxiety levels also shows similar results as the depression levels. There is also a positive relationship between computer addiction and anxiety levels of the participant. Like the depression results, the higher the computer addiction the greater the anxiety level of the child.