A Correlation Study on the Effect of Internet Addiction on Depression Among Adults at Selected College, Rajkot

Internet addiction disorder (IAD) is a modern day addiction. Persons with IAD can exhibit symptoms, suffer drawbacks, and face consequences that are similar to individuals addicted to alcohol, gambling, narcotics, shopping, and other compulsive behaviors. One way to describe persons infected with this disorder is that they find the virtual environment to be more attractive than everyday reality. Their daily lives are dominated with their need to be online. Sadly, this addiction is affecting millions of adolescents and their families in every aspect of their life. The primary areas affected include school, family, work and relationships. The research design adopted was Co relational Research Design. The conceptual frame work for this study was based on Health Belief Model. The study had been conducted in Atmiya Engineering College, Rajkot. Non-probability purposive sampling technique had been adopted to select the desired samples. The sample size was 160. As an intervention I administered the Internet addiction scale among the samples and identified the level of Internet addiction among them and then administered the depression scale for the purpose of assessing the level of depression among the internet addicted individuals. The collected data were analyzed by using both descriptive and inferential statistical methods, 'r' test was used to evaluate relationship between internet addiction and depression. The obtained 'r' value was 0.4749 which showed high significance at 0.001 level. Hence findings of the study revealed that there was a significant relationship between the internet addiction and depression and also there was significant association between the mean difference in Internet Addiction and daily usage of the internet (χ²=20.028),purpose of use ((χ²=59.20) and Money spend on internet (χ²=19.12) and there was significant association between the mean difference depression and daily usage of the internet (χ²=26.24and Time frame for using internet (χ²=23.05).