A Standardized Questionnaire Protocol for Internet Addiction and Emotion-Regulation Assessment in University Students

Internet use is deeply embedded in university life, but problematic internet use cannot be evaluated adequately by exposure time alone. Evidence suggests that maladaptive or compulsive patterns of internet use are associated with difficulty in emotion regulation, yet inconsistencies in questionnaire order, eligibility criteria, screening thresholds, scoring procedures, and analytic reporting continue to limit comparability across studies. This method's article presents a standardized questionnaire protocol for behavioral-science and psychological-assessment studies examining internet addiction and emotion-regulation difficulty among university students. The workflow includes a fixed questionnaire sequence, prespecified eligibility criteria, mandatory-response settings, pilot-based completion-time thresholds, sequential data-quality screening, standardized scoring of the Internet addiction test and the 16-item difficulties in emotion regulation scale, and reproducible descriptive, correlational, and multivariable regression analyses. The protocol also specifies archiving of raw returns, screening logs, README/codebook files, and the final analysis-ready dataset. A representative implementation is reported to demonstrate execution of the protocol rather than to validate the instruments or establish prevalence. In that implementation, 520 students were invited, and 480 questionnaires were returned. After sequential exclusion of duplicate submissions, speeded responses, failed attention checks, patterned responding, logical inconsistency, and missing core data, 452 valid questionnaires were retained. The predefined analytic demonstration examined the association between the Internet addiction test total score and the difficulties in emotion regulation scale total score. The retained sample showed a mean Internet addiction test total score of 51.94 and a mean Difficulties in emotion regulation scale total score of 35.95. Emotion-regulation difficulty increased across internet-addiction severity groups, and the association remained evident after adjustment for demographic and behavioral covariates. This protocol provides a transparent workflow that can be repeated, audited, and adapted for future cross-sectional, repeated-measure, or longitudinal studies in university populations.