The Relationship Between Social Support and Internet Addiction in Nursing Students: The Mediating Role of Alexithymia

Introduction: The extent of internet use broadly influences the different aspects of life. Also, the cognitive, emotional, and environmental factors affect the internet dependency. Objectives: Severe internet dependency creates a disorder, therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between social support and internet addiction in nursing students, considering the mediating role of alexithymia. Materials and Methods: It was a descriptive-correlational study based on structural equation modeling and specific regression equation. A total number of 361 nursing students (178 females and 183 males) were selected with the random sampling method, in Gorgan City, Iran, from October to November 2018. The participants filled the Zimet et al. (1988) social support scale, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, and the Young (1996) internet addiction scale. Then, the collected data were analyzed with the regression structural equation modeling, in SPSS-18 and Amos-23 software programs. Results: The regression equations showed a direct effect of social support on internet addiction and an indirect effect of social support on internet addiction with the mediation of alexithymia (P ˂ 0.01). Moreover, alexithymia positively affects internet addiction (P ˂ 0.01), and social support negatively affects alexithymia (P ˂ 0.01).  Conclusion: The study model predicts 33% of internet addiction variance. This research highlights the important effect of social support on internet addiction, which is mediated by alexithymia, in students. These results provide advisers and trainers with applicable methods to improve the psychological states of students.

Keywords:

Internet addiction , Social support , Alexithymia