How Have Researchers Acknowledged and Controlled for Academic Work Activity When Measuring Medical Students' Internet Addiction? A Systematic Literature Review.

Ken Masters,Teresa Loda,Anne Herrmann-Werner,Finja Tervooren

doi:10.3390/ijerph18147681

Abstract

Internationally, medical students’ Internet Addiction (IA) is widely studied. As medical students use the Internet extensively for work, we asked how researchers control for work-related Internet activity, and the extent to which this influences interpretations of “addiction” rates. A search of PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar was conducted on the search phrase of “medical students” and “internet addiction” in March 2020. In total, 98 studies met our criteria, 88 (90%) used Young’s Internet Addiction Test, and the studies’ IA rates ranged widely. Little note was taken of work-related activity, and, when discussed, had little to no impact on the interpretation of Internet “addiction”. Studies seldom accounted for work-related activities, researcher bias appears to influence their position, “usage” appears conflated with “addiction”, and correlations between “addiction” and negative behaviours are frequently confused with one-way causation. In spite of IA’s not being officially recognised, few researchers questioned its validity. While IA may exist among medical students, its measurement is flawed; given the use of the Internet as a crucial medical education tool, there is the risk that conscientious students will be labelled “addicted”, and poor academic performance may be attributed to this “addiction”.

Highlights

Given that the Internet and medical students are both globally represented, one would assume that a systematic review of articles combining Internet Addiction (IA) in medical students would be globally represented
Given that much of the English-speaking Internet is American and that Kimberly Young is based in the USA, one would expect a bias of papers from the USA
This review has examined the results of studies purporting to measure Internet Addiction in medical students

Summary

Introduction

The Internet, with some 1.8 billion websites and 4.5 billion users [1,2], is a vast, multifaceted tool, crucial to all modern human activity, including work, research, study, and entertainment. Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) by psychiatrist Ivan K. Internet Addiction (IA) has become widely and seriously discussed. A simple Google search on the phrase delivers more than 5 million hits, there have been arguments and support to have IAD (or variations of it) officially recognised in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) [4,5,6,7], and several researchers believe that it is already there [8,9,10,11]

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Conclusion