Internet Addiction Scale for School and College Students - Construction, validation, and cutoff derivation

With young people and teenage children, India has recently become a hotspot for a multiple-fold increase in internet users. The objective of our study was planned to create a psychometric scale specially targeting school and college students with appropriate validation and cut-off derivation, as these groups are collective and also holds a major burden of internet addiction and also a potential risk group for developing internet addiction disorder.

This was a cross-sectional study with a sample size of 1530 done among college students and school students studying between IX to XII standard with habit of internet usage. A google form survey questionnaire was used and study was conducted for a period of 2 months. Domain identified was Internet addiction which was followed by Item generation done by both Inductive, Deductive method and Content validity obtained from the field experts. After Cognitive Interviewing, survey was conducted by circulating the constructed scale in the Google form questionnaire to the eligible participants. After collecting the required data from the participants, the scale was subjected to Item Reduction Analysis.

The mean age of the study participants was 18.96 ±3.68 years and most of them were females. All the individual items had discrimination index value of higher than 0.75 and Cronbach's alpha of 0.75. The total weighed score calculated by adding the individual weighed score came as 21078. Correction factor obtained by dividing the weighed score to the raw score was 0.89. Using the Internet Addiction Scale for School and College Students (IASSCS) having a cut off value of 16 to delineate a person to have Internet addiction and No Internet addiction, around 63% of the study participants were found to have internet addiction and 37% of them were not having Internet addiction and among them a greater number of Internet addicts were found to be male compared to females.

Due to the fact that internet addiction is linked to numerous physical and mental health problems, it may be more beneficial to use scale reports as screening tools at the primary health care level in order to identify high-risk groups for health problems caused by internet addiction at the earliest.