Internet Addiction: A Childs Delusion to Restore Psychosocial Well-Being

Abstract

‘Wellbeing’ is a construct, ‘it’ talks about the total happiness of a person defined via three major perspectives which are: by absence of negative emotions, presence of positivity and life satisfaction, According to WHO, emotional and physical stimulation is a part of psychosocial wellbeing, which should be taken care of after meeting nutritional deficiencies of a child. Ryff talks about six dimensions of psychological wellbeing which are representation of eudemonic (meaning of life), that represents subjective happiness cannot be equated with wellbeing. Internet is a vast repository of knowledge; leading to positive and negative effects. This medium of information and various social platforms are not just for lazing, entertaining, learning but also addictive in nature; they tend to give a social satisfaction to children but may lead to psychological damage that they may be unaware of. Internet identity and usage is something that cannot be denied or restricted in this era and so their effects on generations. Children become a part of this syndrome due to social influence and hence misinterpret it as a part of social image. In recent times, there occurs a gap to satisfy these six dimensions in factual existence thus, a search is initiated and children turn towards the virtual dimension to abridge this space and establish the satisfaction that they are seeking. It seems to be successful at some level but not literally. The objective of this paper is to find the existence of internet addiction, patterns of usage of internet and reasons of usage on a school child and understanding Ryffsix dimension model in context to their responses. It’s a qualitative paper which employed the data collection from 15 private school students on the basis of random purposive sampling from the demographics age 14-17 years by asking open ended questions related to their use of internet. Ethical oral consent was sought and the person was informed. Its main aim is towards social constructivism. Responses were then compared to Ryff model to seek association. The results show that Internet contributes towards the concept of wellbeing to a certain extent and a relational pattern is studied and observed between Ryff Model and reasons of students usage of internet.

Keywords: Internet Addiction, Ryff Model, Psychosocial Well-Being, Internet Dependency

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