10% of
Students May Spend Too Much Time Online, Study Suggests
Monday, June 5, 2000
By
LEO REISBERG
At least 10 percent of college
students use the Internet so much that it interferes
with their grades, their health, and their social lives,
and the problem may run much deeper at science and
engineering institutions, a psychologist at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute said here Friday at the annual
conference of the American College Health Association.
Keith J. Anderson, a staff
psychologist at Rensselaer's Counseling Center, reported
on the findings of a survey of 1,300 college students at
seven American institutions and one in Ireland, which he
conducted in 1998-99. His study, which he expects to be
published this summer in The Journal of American College
Health, used the criteria from the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, which
researchers use to define dependency on substances like
alcohol and habits like gambling. Of the 1,078
participants who said they used the Internet, more than
100 of them fit the criteria -- such as withdrawal from
other activities -- for Internet dependency.
The students who were identified as
dependent spent an average of 229 minutes a day using
the Internet for nonacademic reasons, compared with 73
minutes a day for others, Mr. Anderson said. As many as
6 percent of the students spent an average of over 400
minutes a day using the Internet. Dependent users
reported negative consequences.
"Grades decline, mostly because
attendance declines. Sleep patterns go down. And they
become socially isolated," Mr. Anderson said.
"Technology could be a really wonderful thing, but
if we don't start looking at some of the consequences,
we'll take the ostrich approach with our heads in the
sand and let the problems sneak up on us."
As part of the study, students were
asked to rate the degree to which their Internet usage
affected their real-life relationships, academic
success, participation in extracurricular activities,
sleep patterns, and meeting new people. For the study,
Mr. Anderson counted Internet activities not related to
class work, including sending or receiving e-mail,
browsing the World Wide Web, downloading software, and
participating in cybersex, graphic interactive games,
newsgroups, and online communities.
The participants were students from
American International University, Black Hawk College,
the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rensselaer,
Siena College, the State University of New York at
Albany, SUNY at Buffalo, and one institution in Ireland.
They were evenly divided among men and women, and they
represented 18 different majors, from liberal arts to
hard sciences. But the type of student most vulnerable
to Internet dependency was clear: Of the 106 classified
in this way, 93 were men. Seventy-six percent of those
identified as dependent studied the hard sciences, with
computer-science majors making up the majority of the
dependents.
Mr. Anderson suggested that his study
may underrepresent the extreme users -- those students
who are so consumed by the Internet that they rarely
leave their rooms. Students filled out paper surveys
while they were in class, and the extreme Internet users
may have skipped class that day to remain in cyberspace,
he said.
"It's not the kind of problem
that comes out of the woodwork at you," Mr.
Anderson said. "It's one of those problems that
operates underneath the fabric of the campus and pops
its head up in other ways. Unless you ask about it, you
don't find out about it."
Students don't generally walk into the
counseling centers on their campuses and tell the staff
that they are spending too much time on the Internet,
Mr. Anderson said. He discovered the problem by asking
two questions of students who see him because they're
struggling with their classes: How much sleep do they
get, and how much time do they spend on the Internet?
The survey was spurred by his
encounter with a student who had flunked out of
Rensselaer at the end of his sophomore year, in 1998.
After three semesters of good academic progress, the
student spent more time in his fourth semester logged on
to the Internet than he did preparing for class or
attending class. The student, whom Mr. Anderson
identified as "Scott," came to the counseling
center because of the academic problems, not because he
believed he was hooked on the computer.
During that semester, Scott had
experienced mild depression, sleeping problems, and
conflict with his parents. Eventually he admitted to Mr.
Anderson that he had spent about 2,000 hours from
January to April participating in an online chat
community. As he continued to withdraw from the campus
community, the online group had become his primary form
of interpersonal communication.
"By the end of April, Scott
didn't know the first or last name of his next-door
neighbor in his residence hall, but he drove to
Tennessee, about 1,900 miles round-trip, to meet a woman
that he met online," Mr. Anderson said in an
interview after the session on excessive Internet use.
"He would say that he had a lot of friends, but he
never met the people he called his friends."
While an extreme case, Scott's
situation motivated Mr. Anderson to conduct the study to
gauge the prevalence of the problem. He said that many
students who have difficulty with social interaction are
susceptible to becoming Internet dependent. In fact,
they often use the Internet as a coping mechanism to
avoid problems in their lives or interpersonal
communication.
Mr. Anderson also said that the
problem of excessive Internet use is growing, as
colleges continue to take steps to make it more
accessible to students -- keeping their computer centers
open 24 hours a day, installing Internet connections in
every dormitory room, and encouraging or even requiring
students to own laptop computers.
During Friday's session, Mr. Anderson
asked the approximately 80 people in the audience --
mostly college health-care providers -- how many had
worked in the last year with students who had social or
academic problems related to excessive Internet use.
About three quarters of them raised their hands. When he
asked how many could recall working with similar
students five years ago, only one hand went up.
"We've gone in the last five years from being
Internet savvy to being so overly Internet connected
that it starts to impact some aspects of our
lives," Mr. Anderson said.
He suggested that colleges find ways
to monitor or restrict the amount of time students spend
on the Internet. For example, colleges could allot a
certain amount of time for students with online Internet
accounts, and if they use up, say, a month's worth of
Internet time in a week, college officials might be able
to intervene. But he doesn't expect the
"debit-system" strategy to be a popular one
among students or administrators.
"Systems administrators see that
as a backward step," he said. "They're trying
to increase accessibility, not decrease it."
Copyright
© 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
TOP
