A Gender Comparative Study on South Korean Youth Internet Addiction

Abstract

As a part of advanced technology society, South Korean youth have been accessing the Internet at a very high pace. The Internet overuse could yield addiction where may be a serious psychological disorder of this century. The literature remarks that gender could make a significant difference on internet addiction. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of gender variable on internet addiction for a sample of South Korean university students (n = 815; 312 females and 503 males). The instrument had two sections; the demographics and twenty Internet Addiction survey items based on a five level scale; “Rarely, Occasionally, Frequently, Often and Always”. The results showed that general tendency among the participants appeared between “Occasionally” and “Frequently” for internet addiction. In order to test five derived study hypotheses, the researchers conducted comparative statistical tests. The t-tests revealed that gender made statistically significant differences on nineteen items where males were higher than females showing that males significantly spend more time on the Internet than females. Additionally, t-tests results showed that seventeen of the survey items showed statistically significant differences with respect to types of technology dominant environment. The researchers created two dummy variables to combine gender and technology dominant environment variables and gender and school year variables, to have a better understanding the gender effect with one-way ANOVA. The gender difference still exists following its merge to technology dominant environment showing that the gender surpasses IT related environment. When school year combines to gender, males show higher scores for certain items, especially for freshman year.