Abstract:

The study aims to determine the status of digital addiction among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between February and April 2021, a total of 1036 university students from Çankırı Karatekin University and Kütahya Dumlupınar University students who voluntarily agreed to participate in the study participated in the cross-sectional descriptive study. An Introductory Information Form and a Digital Addiction Scale were used in the research. Individual consent were obtained from the participants and the data were collected with the Google form link. The data analysis used t-tests for independent groups and ANOVA tests for multiple groups. The mean age of the students participating in the study was 20.25±1.88. 79.5% of the students were girls, and 45.1% were first-year students. The mean score of the Digital Addiction Scale for the students was 76.44±19.676, the mean score of the game sub-dimension score was 20.53±8.336, the mean score of the social media dimension was 37.36±9.737, and the mean score of the effect on social life dimension was 18.54±6.791. Digital addiction was found to be statistically significant higher in male than in female. While digital addiction was high in the male gender in the game sub-dimension, it was higher in the female gender in the social media sub-dimension. The time spent by the students on the internet outside the course after pandemic increased according to before pandemic. As the daily on the internet outside the course use time increased, the digital addiction score increased. The increase in digital addiction, one of the biggest dangers brought by the developing technology, raises the concern of being a risk for future generations.

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