A research on analysis of vocational high school students' internet addiction within the context of various variables

Research is conducted to determine the scale of internet addiction of students studying in different types of technical and vocational schools and the differentiation in this addiction depending on variables. The research sample consists of 1352 male and 57 female students which make 1409 students in total studying in 9th ,10th ,11th and 12th grades of different technical vocational schools in the district of Uskudar, Istanbul in the 2012-2013 academic year. The sample group of 559 (39.7%) are studying in Industrial Vocational High School while 471 (33.4%) of them studying in Anatolian Technical High School, 282 (20.0%) studying in Technical High School and 97 (6.9%) of them studying in Anatolian Vocational High School. Besides Personal Information Form, "Internet Addiction Scale (IAS)" was used as data collection tool developed by the researchers Hahn and Jerusalem adapted to Turkish by Sahin C. and Korkmaz O. IAS is a five-digit Likert-type scale consists of 19 items that can be grouped under three factors. Sub-dimensions of scale are "loss of control", "Desire of being online for longer times" and "negativity in social relations" (Sahin, Korkmaz, 2011). In the study, data analysis was performed with SPSS 15.0 software package. One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and the t test for independent groups of parametric analysis techniques were used for the analysis of data. If the difference is significant, LSD of post-hoc techniques is used to determine that in favor of which groups there is difference. In addition, Pearson Product Moment Correlation analysis technique was used in determining the relationship between the groups. When the findings were evaluated; internet addiction had p <.001 level of correlation with easy access to the Internet, personal computer and accessing the internet daily over 2 hours, self-evaluation variables regarding internet addiction; and p<.05 level of correlation found between internet addiction and school type, age, time zone variables that internet used. On the other hand, a significant relation couldn't be found between variables of gender, parents to be dead or not and internet addiction even at the level of p> .05. According to Pearson Product Moment Correlation Analysis conducted to determine correlation between sub-dimensions of Internet Addiction Scale (IAS) and the total score of this scale; significant positive correlations have been found between total scores of Internet Addiction Scale and loss of control, desire of being online for longer times, negativity subscale scores in social affairs (p<.001). Many variables that could transform the use of internet into internet addiction of technical and vocational high school students have been found with this study.