청소년 인터넷 중독과 무망감간의 관련성 연구

Abstract

As the Internet spreads to all corners of our life and brings about rapid changes in our lifestyle, many problems are caused by the use of the Internet. In particular, adolescents are most highly exposed to the problems, and are suffering from them seriously. Accordingly, it is needed to study on adolescents' desirable Internet use habit formation and the causes of problems by the Internet. The most serious problem caused by the use of the Internet is excessive Internet use, or Internet addiction. Many studies are being conducted to find out the cause of Internet addiction, and many possible causes are being suggested. There are many aspects which cause Internet addiction - individual aspect, environmental aspect, and Internet itself. Among them, it can be said that the individual aspect is the key factor to Internet addiction. Depression, which is an individual aspect factor of Internet addiction, has been discussed a lot. It is reported that people in the Internet addiction group have higher depression scores than those in the normal group. This research is to identify the effects of Hopelessness, as a single factor among intermediary factors causing depression, on the Internet addiction of adolescents. This research measured the adolescents students' state of hopelessness using Hopelessness Depression Symptom Questionnaire (HDSQ), which demonstrates the extent of hopelessness depression symptom, and Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), which exhibits Beck‘s hopelessness scale, after conducting the analyses on the reliability of those questionnaires, and question factors. Correlations between the group in hopelessness state and the user group via the Internet Addiction Self-Test (K-scale) was comparatively analyzed. The study result reveals that reliability and validity of the questionnaire were high. As a result of the comparative analysis between the hopelessness state group and the Internet addicted user group through sub-factors of the questions, all the sub-factors showed statistically significant differences. In particular, the average score of the high risk Internet addicted user group was highest in both HDSQ and BHS. Consequently, these results imply that hopelessness affects the Internet addicted users.