Investigation of the relationship between internet addiction, communication skills and expression of emotions of university students during the pandemic process

The aim of the study is to examine the relationship between internet addiction, communication skills and expressing emotions of university students during the social isolation process and to compare them in terms of various demographic variables. The population of the research consists of students who continue their education in Manisa Celal Bayar University, Faculty of Sport Sciences. The sample group consists of a total of 443 volunteers, 279 women and 164 men, who were selected by the convenience sampling method among the students. "Internet Addiction Scale", "Expressing Emotions Scale" and "Communication Skills Scale", including the personal information form developed by the researcher, were applied to the participants. In order to determine the distribution of the obtained data, Skewness, Kurtosis values and Levene Test results were examined. After it was determined that the data did not show normal distribution, statistical analysis methods; percentage, frequency, arithmetic mean, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskall Wallis-H, ANOVA and Pearson Correlation Test were performed.As a result of the findings, a statistically significant difference was found in the Internet addiction scale, expressing emotions and İBÖ in terms of the variables of the participants' gender, regular sports status, internet connection tools, duration of being connected to the internet (day-time) and internet use purposes. A statistically positive and moderately significant difference was found between İBÖ and Expressing Emotions.In addition, a statistically negative and low-level significant difference was found between Internet addiction and İBÖ. As a result, individuals with high Internet addiction scores were found to have low communication skills, while individuals with high communication skills scores had low Internet addiction scores. It has been determined that individuals with a high score for expressing emotions also have high communication skills scores and women participants have higher scores.