Examining the relationship between high school students' internet addiction, digital game addiction and the attitudes of them towards social media

When it is considered that social media, games and thus the internet affect students' educational experiences, it is important to know students' internet and digital game addictions, their attitudes towards social media, and to reveal the relationship of the three with each other is important for the education policies and efficiency of platforms to be established. Therefore, in this study, it is aimed to examine the relationship between high school students' İnternet addiction, digital game addiction and the attitudes of them towards social media. A correlational survey model is used in the study. The sample of the study consists of a total of 1268 participants involving 9th and 11th-grade students in public high schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in Bornova district of İzmir province in the 2016-2017 academic year. A self-information form prepared by researcher, Short Form of Young's Internet Addiction Test developed by Kutlu, Savcı, Demir, ve Aysan (2016), The Turkish Version of the Digital Game Addiction Scale developed by Yalçın Irmak ve Erdoğan (2015) and Social Media Attitude Scale developed by Otrar ve Argın (2015) were applied to get data. According to demographic information, only 4% of the participants don't use social media., The ones using social media prefer mobile phones to connect. Mostly used social media sites are respectively Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. High school students use the Internet mostly for fun, to chat and to visit social media sites. While 41% of gamers play games that not requiring social media account, 41% of the students do not play any games. Action, adventure and strategy type games are prefered among high school students. The games are played on mobile devices. Social media attitudes of high school students are high and positive. The attitude towards social media varies on behalf of girls according to gender, 9th-grade students according to class and Anatolian high school students according to school type. The Internet and digital game addiction scores of the students are not high. Internet addiction scores do not change according to gender, class or school type. Game addiction scores did not show significant differences according to class and school type but differed in favour of men by gender. As the duration of internet usage increases, attitudes towards social media, internet addiction and digital game addiction scores increase positively. In this study, it is determined that there was a low relationship between internet addiction and attitudes towards social media, and between internet addiction and game addiction. No relation was found between attitudes towards social media and game addiction. In this study, it is thought that examining the relationship between students' attitude towards social media, internet and game addictions will be beneficial for practitioners and researchers who want to examine the status of high school students regarding these three variables.