Social Psychology - Loneliness - Essay Example

Problematic Internet Usage Positively Associates with Social, Family and Romantic Loneliness in Toowoomba, Australia Internet appears to help loneliness by providing opportunity for online social interaction. In contrast internet may cause loneliness. Purpose of this study was to find out association between internet usage and loneliness. 249 (124 males and 125 females) individuals who had internet access from home and used internet for personal reason were recruited. Their internet usage and loneliness was measured using a questionnaire. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients showed significant positive correlation between internet usage and social, family and romantic loneliness. Ignorance of the society due to problematic internet usage may be the reason for loneliness. These findings suggest to facilitate interpersonal relationships to overcome the loneliness. Future studies are required with the adjustments to minimize compounding factors including age. Problematic Internet Usage Positively Associates with The Social, Family and Romantic Loneliness in Toowoomba, Australia Loneliness is a state of mind when an individual experiences undesirable psychological phenomenon such as emptiness, boredom and depression associated to lack of interpersonal relationship. Loneliness should not be mistaken as physical distraction from the society or solitary (Morahan-Martin, 1999). A person can be lonely even in the middle of a crowded city while another person feels a companionship in a desert. This is very subjective condition and variations are high between individuals. However, loneliness triggers when an individual does not have a person of his desire to communicate with. The dilemma of Internet usage and loneliness emerged with the rapid increase of Internet users via social networks. At present whether the lonely are drawn to the Internet or Internet creates the loneliness is controversial. Today Internet provides huge opportunity for its users to interact with the society members via many social networks. Further it provides a chance to freely express own thoughts and feelings to anyone. Although there is no assurance for the quality, a person can build up interpersonal relationship more easily via Internet than in real life. Researches on chronic loneliness have revealed lonely individuals are lacking social skills required to create and maintain interpersonal relationships. This raised the idea that lonely people are more likely to use Internet as it facilitates personal interactions and does not require social skills. Supporting the idea early researches showed lonely individuals are more prone to become computer hackers (Morahan-Martin, 1999) because they are able to communicate and create an image safely through those activities with fun and social acceptation without being denied, as in their real life. With the rapid expansion of Internet social networks and easy low cost accessibility, considerable numbers of users are interested in creating interpersonal relationships via Internet than in real life. Internet relationships are highly flexible, users can select the person create or end relationship without much problem and this is safe and users can hide their real identity or create false identity to gain a prestige. Thereby literally, lonely are drawn to internet. The argument is Internet addiction creates loneliness. This is supported by the idea that internet addicted individuals are creating more unrealistic and weaker interpersonal relationships with the people that physically not known and that leads to distract from the physically known society including their own family, neighbors. With time they become more and more isolated. When they face a real world circumstances there is a limited chance to get the help from the internet society. Moreover they can be easily abused. Study conducted by Ghassemzadeh (2008) using 1968 students on relationship between Internet addiction and loneliness, found significantly higher number of lonely individuals in Internet addicted group than in moderate users and nonusers. Also he found significant lack of social skills in Internet addicts than in non addicts in par with results of previous studies. Another study by Kraut et al, (1998) using 256 individuals from 93 families found a significant inverse association between usage of Internet and social involvement. Higher the use of Internet lowers the meaningful social involvement in the participants. Further this shows a potential threat of lacking social skills due to Internet use. Today Internet is an essential route of communication and is incomparable due to its unique characteristics. However it should be optimally used for the wellbeing of the individuals and society. Since early studies were random and widely different in methods, participants, age, race etc. neither hypotheses can be supported with adequate evidence. The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between loneliness and problematic Internet usage in a community sample of adults. It was hypothesized that those whose Internet usage is more problematic will experience more social, family, and romantic loneliness than those whose Internet usage is less problematic. Methods Participants Two hundred forty nine (249) participants, 124 males and 125 females who have internet access from home and used internet for personal purposes were recruited for this study. All the participants were closely known by the students enrolled in PSY2010- Social Processes of Behaviour course at the University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba, Australia. None of the participants were PSY2010 students. Age of the participants ranged from 18 to 68 years with the mean of 33.8 years. The sample consisted of 51.8% of friends, 22.1% spouse or romantic of partners, 24.9% of relatives and 1.2% of others. Majority of the participants (77.5%) were Anglo Australians while others are belong to different ethnic groups. About 35% of the participants were never married and more than 50% of them had some kind of relationship. Materials A questionnaire was adapted to gather data on the two main variables (internet usage for personal reason and loneliness). The questionnaire had three main parts. First part consisted questions about personal information such as age, marital status, internet access frequency etc. and second and third parts contains questions on internet usage and loneliness’ Twenty questions to measure the independent variable, internet usage and problematic internet usage were adapted based on the Internet Use Survey developed by Armstrong, Plilips and Saling (2000). Each question has a scale of 1-10 to best match the personal feeling between two qualitative extremes “Not true at all” and “Extremely true”. The questionnaire was noticeably designed to identify the problematic internet use and the scale provided the extent. Higher scores indicated more troublesome internet use that has gone beyond the socially safe limits and hamper the social life. Loneliness was measured using a 15 questions which had seven &) qualitative statements to describe their feelings from “Strong disagreement” to “Strong agreement”. Those questions were the short form of the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA) developed by DiTommaso, Brannen, and Best (2004). Following scale was used for the analysis. 7 = strongly agree 6 = moderately agree 5 = slightly agree 4 = neutral 3 = slightly disagree 2 = moderately disagree 1 = strongly disagree Procedure All the students enrolled to PSY2010 course were requested to find two known participants for the study. The selection criteria required to recruit participants who were not enrolled in PSY2010 course, who have internet access from home and who used internet for personal reason other than work or study. Anyone who did not meet the criteria was excluded. Volunteer participants were briefed about the purpose of the study, how data is collected, confidentiality and that they will be informed about the findings. Informed consent was obtained from the volunteers who willing to participate in the study. Questionnaire was then given to the participants and explain them how to fill the questionnaire. They were requested to return the completed questionnaires to the investigators. Incomplete or incorrectly answered questionnaires were excluded. Results Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed between Internet usage and each of the three types of loneliness. Results indicated that Internet usage was positively correlated with social, family, and romantic loneliness. All correlations were statistically significant. Thus, the more problematic a persons Internet usage, the more likely that he or she experienced loneliness in the social, family, and romantic domains. Discussion The test hypothesis, Internet usage associates with the loneliness is supported by the results of this study due to the significant positive correlation obtained from the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients. Similar trends also had been observed in a large study conducted by Ghassemzadeh et al. (2008) participating 1968 Iranian students. Ghassemzadeh found internet addicts were lonelier and have low self esteem and lack of social skills than non addicts. However present study cannot be considered as a reproduction of Ghassemzadeh’s study since the methods were widely varied. The participants of the Ghassemzadeh study were all students between 14 -16 years and thereby small variation in the age. Further, assessment tools (questions) to measure loneliness, self esteem, social skills and internet addiction were different from ours. Kraut et al. (1998) also found similar results in his two year follow-up study conducted recruiting 169 participants. The study was designed to minimize the effect of compounding factors and had used advance statistical analysis making the results more reliable. The reason for positive correlation between internet usage and social, family, and romantic loneliness can be the ignorance of the society physically closed to a person. If further explained, when an individual use the internet extensively he has limited time to build reliable and valuable relationships with the family and society. He may not be able to cater requirements of family members, friends and society. Online interpersonal relationships are not reliable and abuses are possible. With the time the person become isolated in the real society and feels lonely when not online. However a person lacking social skills to build up reliable relationship also can be a problematic internet user since internet relationships are easy and needed different skills. Moreover there can be special situations such as ethnicity, physical disability and social status which encourage individuals to create internet relationships and prevent real society interactions. The positive correlation between internet usage and social, family and romantic loneliness found in this study also suggests how to overcome the loneliness. That is, a person can conquer loneliness by strengthening or creating reliable social, family and romantic relationships. Further the society can help lonely individuals by facilitating them to build valuable interpersonal relationship. The present study has several points to be modified in order to draw a generalize conclusion based on the results. The age range of the study was too wide (ranged from 18 to 68 years) and age related adjustments were not considered. However psychological conditions like loneliness can be age related (i.e. feeling of loneliness can be altered with the age). Loneliness is a multifaceted conditions and it may caused by reasons other than internet usage. These reasons may include income, social status, physical disability, drug addiction etc. Since these factors were not considered in this study the true association may differ (greater or lesser) from the results. However Effect of gender difference not likely to interfere with the results due to recruitment of the equal number of males and females. To overcome the limitations and generalization future studies are required to recruit participants within small age ranges or age adjustments should be considered in the statistical analysis. Further the questionnaire should include questions to assess other compounding factors such as income, social status, disability etc. and results needed to be adjusted accordingly. Follow-up studies are encouraged and important to observe how loneliness occurs and interpersonal relationships are affected with the increased usage of internet over the time. References 1. Ghassemzadeh, L., Shahraray, M., Moradi, A. (2008). Prevalence of Internet Addiction and Comparison of Internet Addicts and Non-Addicts in Iranian High School. Cyberpsychology & Behavior,11:731-733. 2. Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukopadhyay, T., Scherlis, W. (1998). A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being ? American Psychologist, 53 ( 9), 1017-1031 3. Morahan-Martin, J. (1999). The Relationship Between Loneliness and Internet use and Abuse. Cyberpsychology & Behavior,2(5): 431-439 Read More