The relationship between information literacy, Internet addiction and general health of an Iranian medical students

Given the prevalence of Internet use worldwide and its existing risks to societies especially the youngsters, information literacy can affect the use of Internet. Hence, the objective of present study is to assess the relationship between information literacy and Internet addiction and then to investigate the relationship between Internet addiction and general health of students in Iran University of Medical Sciences.
It is an analytical cross-sectional study which was conducted during 2016 on students in Iran University of Medical Sciences (Tehran, Iran). The sample size for the surveyed community of 6,500 university students was 362 from the Cochran sample size formula. Then, using a simple random sampling method, from each of the colleges, the sample size was selected according to the student population. Three questionnaires of information literacy, Yang's Internet addiction, and general health scale (GHQ-28) were distributed among students. Finally, 365 questionnaires were collected and analyzed.
29.9% of students were about to be addicted to the Internet, 1.3% had symptoms of Internet addiction and 68.8% had no addiction. In terms of information literacy, most of the students were in moderate level (60.5% moderate, 3.3% low, and 36.2% high information literacy level). There was a significant inverse relationship between increasing of information literacy and the Internet addiction (r = -0.45 and p According to the findings of this study, it was perceived that the higher the information literacy, the lower the level of Internet addiction; besides, reduction of internet addiction increased the general health of students. Therefore, considering the importance of students as the leading group in societies, and favorable consequences of increased information literacy, universitie's authorities have to develop and run specific programs within the educational and research schedule in order to increase the student's information literacy. Accordingly, undesirable outcomes of Internet use would be diminished and general health of society would be improved.