Gender and Internet Addicition: The Malaysian Experience

Abstract

A total of 388 social science students (134 male and 254 female) from a Malaysian university were surveyed using the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) devised by Young (1998). It was found that the average time spent on the Internet was 4.54 hours/day; about two thirds (67.7%) of the respondents were Internet addicted, being classified under Internet Addiction Levels 2 and 3 (IAT scores 40 points and above) with Level 1 denoting average Internet usage; and more than half (56.4%) were classified under Internet Addiction Level 2. In addition, another 11.3% of the respondents who were placed on Level 3 had “significant problems” related to Internet addiction. The findings further indicated that male students were significantly more susceptible to Internet addiction compared with female students. Nevertheless, the correlation between time spent on the Internet and the severity of addiction to the Internet was only low to moderate for female and male students respectively. The present study provides a basic assessment of the problem of Internet addiction that could be applied more broadly to students in Malaysian institutions of higher education.