Comparing self-efficacy, quality of life and sleep quality among medical students with and without internet addiction

Objective (s):

 Internet addiction as a new phenomenon in the young generation, especially in students, has led to a lack of attention to physical and mental health, reduced quality of life, sleep and educational problems. Also, self-efficacy as a personality trait that can play a role in Internet addiction. The purpose of this study was to compare self-efficacy, quality of life and sleep quality of medical students with and without internet addiction.           

The present study was a cross-sectional study. The study population was all students of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in academic year 2019-2020. Using the stratified random sampling method, 300 students (115 men and 185 women) were selected as the samples.  The Young internet addiction questionnaire, the short form health survey (SF-36), the Sherer self-efficacy beliefs questionnaire, and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality questionnaire were used to collect data Multivariate analysis of variance used to analyze the data.

In all 300 medical and dental students aged 18 to 39 years participated in the study. Multivariate analysis of variance, showed that there was a significant difference between quality of life (P< 0/001), self-efficacy (P< 0/001) and sleep quality (P< 0/001) of among students with and without internet addiction.

The findings confirmed that the internet addicted users had lower quality of life, lower sleep quality and lower self-efficacy, than regular users.