Monday, June 5, 2000

10% of Students May Spend Too Much Time Online, Study Suggests By LEO REISBERG Toronto 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."