Internet addiction and adaptation problems of first-year students of a technical university to the educational and professional environment
The study aims to assess the problem of Internet addiction in adolescent men. The objectives of the research are: (1) to conduct a questionnaire among first-year students in a technical college; (2) to specify the concept "Internet addiction" in the context of first-year students' adaptation; (3) to determine activities that allow to minimize the possibility of forming Internet addiction or to reduce the negative factors of the Internet impact on the educational process. The study involved 359 male students of the Energy Institute of Tomsk Polytechnic University who entered the university in 2017. The age of the respondents was from 16 to 22. The study was conducted on the basis of a technique developed by Kimberly Young. The data obtained indicate a significant number of the Internet dependent (13.1%) among students of the first year. More than half of the surveyed students (76.7%) have some problems associated with excessive interest in the Internet. Only 10.2% of the students are standard users of the Internet. Based on the study, the following conclusions can be drawn. (1) The number of Internet dependent students among first-year students is almost 10% higher than the number of Internet-dependent ones identified by E.I. Tsimberovo, D.O. Schurko and NL Batsukova among pupils and students in 2010, and 6% compared to the results of a study conducted by S.E. Grishin in 2017, but correlated with the number of Internet-dependent among the students of the first and second years of the Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University in 2015-2016. (2) The absence of statistically significant differences between students of different ages is explained by the students' similar conditions: living in a dormitory, studying the same subjects, engaging in similar extracurricular activities. (3) Long pastime in social networks is connected with the desire to make new friends among the new environment since many freshmen came to study at the university from other cities, and often experience difficulties in adapting to a new unfamiliar environment. (4) The timing of online games and watching videos on the Internet is explained by the lack of parental control. When they were in school, parents somehow controlled the distribution of adolescents' free time, while at university they are on their own. Having received "freedom" students begin to spend even more time at a computer not for studying. As a result, they begin to skip classes and accumulate debts, which in the future can lead to serious problems with academic results. (5) The results obtained cannot be extended to students of all courses, because after the adaptation period, a redistribution of the number of students between Internet dependent groups is possible. It is advisable to conduct a second study among the same students in the second year and conduct a comparative analysis of the data obtained, as well as to search for ways to reduce the level of Internet addiction.