Relationship between internet addiction and self-esteem

• Autor(a) principal: Seabra, Liliana Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/6014
• topic: Adição à Internet; Autoestima; Internet; Uso Problemático da Internet; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Psicologia

Internet is a global phenomenon with an ever increasing amount of users. More and more, people are easily and continuously online, due to the use of laptops, smartphones and tablets. Internet has its disadvantages, usually related to the problematic use of the internet, referred as internet addiction. The psychological variables that are associated with this addiction are still being investigated. Therefore we decided to study the relationship between internet addiction and self-esteem. This dissertation is composed of three parts. The first part is an introduction to the work elaborated, and contains the objectives and the context of the dissertation. The second part includes the article “Relationship between internet addiction and selfesteem: Cross cultural study in Portugal and Brazil”, written in English, to be submitted to the journal: Computers in Human Behavior. The article is divided in introduction, theoretical background and hypothesis, method, results, discussions and references. To summarize the investigation contained in the article, we can say that the sample included 1399 Portuguese and Brazilian internet users, from 14 to 83 years old, who responded to the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) (Young, 1998b) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) (Rosenberg, 1989). A factor analysis of the IAT was conducted, revealing three factors: withdrawal & concealment, social & personal consequences, and excessive use. Using Pearson correlation, we found a negative correlation among internet addiction and self-esteem. Linear regression indicated that low self-esteem explained 11% of internet addiction, and negative feelings caused by internet addiction (withdrawal & concealment) explained 13% of selfesteem. In the analysis of the IAT, we found that the individuals with higher levels of internet addiction were: (a) man; (b) Brazilian; and (c) young (14 to 25 years old). The third part includes the final considerations about the article and the dissertation. There are also two Appendixes. The first is a more extensive theoretical background about internet addiction and self-esteem. The second contains the author information pack, for the journal Computers in Human Behavior, in which the norms for the article were based.