The Questionnaire of Lifestyle Change in Regard to Problematic Internet Use: Factor Structure and Concurrent and Cross-year Predictive Utilities

This study constructed a questionnaire, named “Lifestyle Change in Regard to Problematic Internet Use (LC-PIU),” for helping school psychologists detect early indications of PIU-related lifestyle changes in university populations. Our focus is on all university students who use the Internet, not users who already show dependent symptoms. The lifestyles that we concerned include physical/social activities and dietary/sleep patterns that are notable consequences of excessive Internet use (Lam et al., 2009; Choi et al., 2009). With 708 university students recruited in 2009 (Time 1), we tested the factor structure of LC-PIU and determined the concurrent and cross-year predictive utilities with the same participants in 2010 (Time 2). The 2009-sample was randomly split into two independent subsamples for calibration and validation using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The calibration and validation results, along with convergent and discriminant tests, confirmed that the LC-PIU is composed of five distinct subscales: problematic Internet use, physical activity change, social activity change, dietary pattern change, and sleep pattern change. All Time-1 LC-PIU subscores were positively correlated with depression, loneliness, and weekly Internet use at Time 1 and Time 2. Only a negative correlation was found between gender and social activity change at Time 1 and Time 2. INTRODUCTION The long-term, excessive use of the Internet, often coined problematic Internet use (PIU), resembles the DSM-IV definition of impulse control disorder (Shapira et al., 2000) or pathological gambling (Young, 1996). Various names associated with Internet addiction include cyberspace/online/net addiction, high Internet dependency, Internet addicted disorder, pathological Internet use, problematic Internet use, excessive Internet use, and compulsive Internet use (Davis, Flett, & Besser, 2002; Hur, 2006; Widyanto & Griffiths, 2006). Previous studies suggest that PIU leads to the disregard of crucial daily responsibilities such as work, academic, family, or social obligations (Morahan-Martin & Schumacher, 2000; Aboujaoude, 2010; Tutgun, Deniz & Moon, 2011, Şahin, 2011). Because the majority of university students live away from home with minimal parental monitoring and easy access to the Internet, we sought to observe whether the initial emergence of PIU alters university students’ daily routines, including changes to their dietary, sleep patterns and physical activities. We were also interested in less-visible (because of their dynamic nature) changes to their social relationships. Lifestyle factors are critical in adolescence because an adequate amount of quality physical/social activities as well as healthy diet/sleep habits facilitate adolescent physiological growth and psychological development. Young (1998a) was a pioneer researcher who developed the Diagnostic Questionnaire for Internet Addiction as a tool to identify maladaptive Internet users. Following her suggestion, some related research based on the mental disorder view to distinct additive users versus normal users. YDQ and some relevant questionnaires (Beard and Wolf, 2001; Shapira et al., 2003; Ko et al., 2005) have been used to select a small percentage of online users with severe dependent symptoms. Their findings mostly contribute to the secondary and tertiary prevention perspectives. In contrast, our motivation was to construct a questionnaire that we named “Lifestyle Change in Regard to Problematic Internet Use (LC-PIU)” for helping school psychologists and educators detect early indications of PIU-related lifestyle changes in university populations. TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology – October 2012, volume 11 Issue 4