Examining the internet addiction and social anxiety levels of preservice teachers

This study investigated pre-service teachers' levels of internet addiction and social media anxiety, as well as differences in these levels based on independent variables (such as gender, department, grade level, duration of social media use, family income level, and daily online activity). The study employed a cross-sectional survey design. A total of 421 preservice teachers (129 science teachers and 292 mathematics teachers) from different grade levels in Central Anatolia were included in the study via simple random sampling. The data were collected using the Internet Addiction Scale developed by Young (1998) and adapted into Turkish by Bayraktar (2001), as well as the Social Anxiety Scale for Social Media Users developed by Alkis, Kadirhan, and Sat (2017). The data were analyzed using SPSS. Mode, median, arithmetic mean, skewness, kurtosis, and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test were used to assess whether the data conformed to a normal distribution. The analysis results indicated that the data conformed to a normal distribution. It was observed that preservice teachers infrequently experience anxiety related to shared content, interaction, and self-assessment. This finding suggests that preservice teachers do not exhibit substantial distress about the content they share on social media, nor do they experience significant concern about social media interactions or evaluations by others. The mean score for the privacy concern factor suggests that participants typically exhibit moderate levels of apprehension in this area. This indicates that apprehensions regarding the privacy and confidentiality of personal information on social media are more prominent than other considerations.