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Prevalence of pathological and maladaptive Internet use and the association with depression and health-related quality of life in Japanese elementary and junior high school-aged children

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Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Pathological Internet use has been predominantly studied in junior high/middle school-aged or older children; data from elementary/primary school-aged children, however, are scarce. The current study aimed to examine the prevalence of problematic Internet use, including pathological and maladaptive Internet use, in elementary and junior high school-aged children and the relationships between problematic Internet use and mental health problems and health-related quality of life.

Methods

The survey was conducted among children who attend national and public elementary and junior high schools in a medium-sized city in Japan; data were received from 3845 elementary school-aged and 4364 junior high school-aged children.

Results

Based on the Young’s Diagnostic Questionnaire score, the prevalence of pathological and maladaptive Internet use was 3.6% and 9.4% and 7.1% and 15.8% in elementary and junior high school-aged children, respectively. The prevalence of problematic Internet use, including pathological and maladaptive Internet use, consistently increased from the 4th grade to the 8th grade. In addition, the prevalence sharply increased between the 7th grade and the 8th grade. Our study revealed that children with pathological and maladaptive Internet use exhibited more severe depression and decreased health-related quality of life than those with adaptive Internet use.

Conclusions

Our results demonstrated that pathological Internet use is not uncommon even in elementary school-aged children and that those with pathological and maladaptive Internet use have severe mental health problems and decreased health-related quality of life, supporting the importance of providing these children with educational and preventive interventions against problematic Internet use and associated risk factors.

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Abbreviations

PIU:

Pathological Internet use

MIU:

Maladaptive Internet use

AIU:

Adaptive Internet use

YDQ:

Young’s Diagnostic Questionnaire

HRQOL:

Health-related quality of life

PedsQL:

Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0 generic scale

DSRS-C:

Depression Self-Rating Scale for Children

ANOVA:

Analysis of variance

CI:

Confidence interval

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the Hirosaki Institute of Neuroscience in Japan (K. N.), Hirosaki University Institutional Research Grant (K. N.), Japan Internet Safety Promotion Association (JISPA) (M. T. and M. A.), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI, grant numbers 15H04889 (K. N.). This study was conducted in collaboration with Hirosaki University and Kodomo Minna Project commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Kodomo Minna Project provided no financial support to this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Child Mental Development, Graduate School of Medicine, Hirosaki University, Hirosaki, 5 Zaifu-cho, Hirosaki, Aomori, 036-8562, Japan

    Michio Takahashi, Masaki Adachi, Sayura Yasuda, Michito Kuribayashi & Kazuhiko Nakamura

  2. Research Center for Child Mental Development, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan

    Tomoko Nishimura

  3. Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Tomoya Hirota

  4. Department of Neuropsychiatry, Graduate School of Medicine, Hirosaki University, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan

    Kazuhiko Nakamura

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  1. Michio Takahashi
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  2. Masaki Adachi
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  3. Tomoko Nishimura
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Correspondence to Michio Takahashi.

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Ethical standards

The protocol of the current study has been approved by the Committee on Medical Ethics of Hirosaki University, and the current study has been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 The eight items of Young’s Diagnostic Questionnaire (YDQ) [1]
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Takahashi, M., Adachi, M., Nishimura, T. et al. Prevalence of pathological and maladaptive Internet use and the association with depression and health-related quality of life in Japanese elementary and junior high school-aged children. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 53, 1349–1359 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-018-1605-z

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