Abstract
BACKGROUND: Internet addiction; excessive and uncontrolled use of the internet is a global problem that affects different segments of the population at different levels. There are many measurement tools in the literature that assess individuals' internet addiction. The aim of this study was to analyze the agreement and compare the characteristics and results of the two most commonly used scales developed by Young and Chen to measure internet addiction. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted between March 2023 and June 2023 among 5th- and 6th-year medical school students. The questionnaire consisted of a section that included questions about the sociodemographic and life characteristics of the students and the Young Internet Addiction Test (IAT) and the Chen Internet Addiction Scale (CIAS-R). RESULTS: The prevalence of Internet addiction in 244 medical students was 15% according to the Young IAT with 50 as the cutoff, 56% according to the Young IAT with 30 as the cutoff and 11% according to the CIAS-R. There was moderate agreement (kappa coefficient: 0.50) between the CIAS-R and Young IAT (50); there was slight agreement (kappa coefficient: 0.17) between the CIAS-R and Young IAT (30). In addition, there was no significant difference between the Young IAT (50) and CIAS-R results. There was a significant, strong correlation (r = 0.81) between the Young IAT (50) and the CIAS-R. Although there was moderate agreement between the Young IAT (50) and CIAS, the agreement between the Young IAT (30) and CIAS-R was poor. CONCLUSIONS: This study showed that the Young IAT and CIAS-R, which are most commonly used for determining internet addiction, did not function in as high agreement as expected. We think that the selection of the population to be applied in new scale development studies will contribute to the importance of selecting people with clinical diagnoses and generalizable to the society.