Internet Addiction Among Medical Students: We may confuse it!

Hi and hola para amigos!

The questions that are asked to determine if someone has internet addiction, like these:

How often do you;

Stay online longer than intended.
Neglect household chores to spend more time online.
Choose to spend more time online than going out with others.

Medical students use the internet to study as well. Internet can be considered as a library. Let’s say the internet completely disappeared, and medical students have to go library for their academic work.

In this situation, could we change the previous questions as follow?

Stay in the library longer than intended.
Neglect household chores to spend more time in the library.
Choose to spend more time in the library than going out with others.

Would we call the students who say “often” to these questions “library addicts”?

To watch this article: https://youtu.be/zBqv6FzMA7g

So, we understand that we should distinguish the online time of the students whether they spend it for studying or for something else. This differentiation is necessary to decide whether they are internet addicts.

Four researchers carried out a systematic review to determine if the body of research about internet addiction of medical students distinguished work-related activity from internet usage. The results are interesting because it reveals the researchers’ bias.

The flamingo is ready to present the results.

Internet addiction among medical students… It is a widely studied topic by researchers from various countries. They use Internet Addiction scales, there are many of the scales. The questions in these scales are similar to the examples that I gave at the beginning of the video. The students answer these questions using the options such as occasionally, often, always, etc.

The researchers in the systematic review of these studies on internet addiction among medical students screened more than five thousand records from various databases, then they finally extracted 98 studies for the full review.

56% percent of the studies acknowledged that the internet is useful for academic work. They acknowledge it mostly in the introduction section. However, they have not discussed it in the discussion section as if it is irrelevant to their work. Even 40% of all of the studies found that the students use the internet for academic purposes, but they ignored this finding, and do not control for it when measuring internet addiction. In short, internet usage is translated as internet addiction no matter what it is used for. So it means that if these researchers would have lived in the times where the internet hasn’t been invented, they would call the students “library addicts” only because they use libraries even if it is for work.

Yeah, we got that the researchers were biased. But why they do? Probably unintentional. There are two indications.

Firstly, they ignore the inevitable role and important value of the internet in general. The students use the internet for shopping or reading news as well. The second one is that they ignore the important value of the internet for academic work. The medical students could study using the internet however the researchers have ignored this truth.

The overall result is that the current tools are not measuring what we intend to measure. They measure medical students’ internet usage that is affected by work-related activities as well. So, we need a multi-disciplinary team to create a more valid tool for measuring internet addiction of students. Until then, we will carry on labeling hard-working students as internet addicts.

You can find the link to the systematic review at the description below this video: https://youtu.be/zBqv6FzMA7g

See you and adios para amigos.

And also, don’t forget the flamingo.