A study of internet addiction levels of primary school and secondary school final year students (The example of Adıyaman province)

This thesis study has examined the internet addiction levels of primary school and secondary school's last year students. The population of this study is composed of 4337 senior students from 26 public primary schools and 4178 senior students from 28 public secondary schools of Adıyaman province in academic year of 2017-2018, in total 8515 students. The sample of the research consists of 1923 senior students from 26 primary schools and 1756 senior students selected from 28 secondary schools which were selected randomly from the schools in population. Of the 3679 students, 2808 were taken into consideration. In this present study the internet addiction Scale which was developed by Günüç (2009) was used to determine the internet addiction levels of primary school and secondary school students'. This scale is a measure for internet addiction that has four basic dimensions such as; "Deprivation", "Control Difficulty", "Functional Deterioration" and "Social Isolation" and consists of 35 sub-dimensions of these four basic dimensions. One Way Anova test, Twostep Cluster and t-test were used in the analysis of collected data. In this study, the following findings were obtained: of the 2808 students who were evaluated, 272 (%9,7) were in the addiction group, 553 (%19,7) are in the addiction risk group, 796 (%28,3) are in the threshold group, 1187 (%42,3) are in the non-addicted group. Considering this data, it is observed that the majority of the students participated in the survey are (%42,3) in the non-addicted group. Significant differences have found in favor of male students among the averages of internet addiction scores according to students' gender. No statistically significant differences were observed among students' views in terms of internet addiction level and students' studying years, parents' education level and jobs. It has been observed significant difference between monthly income and internet addiction level. The internet addiction level of the students who are not interested in any sport branch have found higher than those who are interested in. It has been found that those who do not play any musical instrument show a higher level of internet addiction than those who play any musical instrument.