Internet escapism and addiction among Japanese senior high school students

ABSTRACT

A person’s use of Web services for escapist purposes is thought to split his or her world into online and real versions, which differ greatly, increasing potential addiction tendencies and eventually leading to harmful consequences for the individual in his or her daily life. In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey targeting Tokyo metropolitan high school students (n = 15,191), and used path analysis to clarify the structure of the model wherein psychological distress leads to harmful consequences through Internet escapism and potential Internet addiction tendencies, each serve as intermediary factors mediating the effect of psychological distress on harmful consequences. As a result, we derived the Psychological Distress-Escapism-Addiction-Harmful Consequences (Escapism-Addiction) model. Psychological distress influenced Internet escapism (0.42), Internet escapism influenced potential Internet addiction tendencies (0.61) and potential Internet addiction tendencies influenced harmful consequences (0.71). This made it possible to quantitatively reveal the structure of Internet escapism, whereby escaping psychological distress by engaging in online activities increased tendencies toward potential Internet dependency and had an adverse impact on the concerned individual’s daily life.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet addiction
• escapism
• psychological distress
• depression

Acknowledgments

This paper is part of the results of joint research by The University of Tokyo Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies (Hashimoto Laboratory) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ Institute for Information and Communications Policy (FY 2014, Principal researcher: Yoshiaki Hashimoto; Project members: Yuka Mishima, Shiroh Ohno, Mihoko Amano, and Yusuke Horikawa). This study was planned and implemented by the above members, in accordance with the ethical principles for research and study. Moreover, the analysis and writing of this paper are the sole responsibility of the author.

Disclosure statement

Author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Notes on contributor

Shiroh Ohno is a assistant professor in the Department of Contemporary Communication of the St.Margaret's Junior College, Tokyo Japan. His research interest includes socioinformatics and social psychology.

Notes

1. In studies indicating the association between Internet addiction and depression, this scale is often adopted (e.g., Young, 1998c).

2. We revised expression to avoid limiting escapism factors to negative mood.

3. This is one of the Internet addiction scales most commonly adopted in large-sample studies (Kuss, Griffiths, Karila, & Billieux, 2014).