Psychological Characteristics of Adolescents with Varying Degrees of Tendency to Internet Addiction

Introduction. This article is dedicated to studying psychological characteristics of modern adolescents with different severity of the tendency to Internet addictive behavior. In the course of the study, theoretical and empirical material concerning the problem of deviant behavior was generalized. Also, individual psychological characteristics of adolescents and the influence of varying degrees of severity of Internet addiction on young people’s meaning of life orientations were identified. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that for the first time, a set of psychological diagnostic techniques aimed at studying the meaningful orientations of adolescents with Internet addiction was formulated and tested.

Purpose. Studying psychological characteristics of adolescents with varying degrees of tendency to Internet addiction. Materials and Methods. As part of the empirical study, the following standardized methods were used: the questionnaire “Behavior on the Internet” by A. E. Zhichkina, the methodology “Questionnaire for studying the level of aggressiveness of Bass-Darka”, “Test of meaningful life orientations (SMO)” by D. A. Leontiev, the methodology “Self-assessment of mental states” by G. Eysenck. Mathematical processing of the obtained data was carried out using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. The data was processed using the computer program “SPSS” 17.0 for Windows”.

Results. The respondents were 120 teenagers studying in general education institutions of the city of Rostov-on-Don. As a result of the study, it was found that the indicators of aggression are least pronounced in adolescents prone to Internet addiction. In respondents without a tendency to addictive behavior, anxiety and frustration were found to be the least.

Discussion. In the group of Internet-dependent adolescents, almost all the main aspects of personality show low indicators, which reflects negative impact of the Internet on formation of individual psychological characteristics of adolescents. The hypothesis of adolescents’ tendency to Internet addiction being associated with peculiarities of meaningful life orientations has been confirmed.

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