The Relationship between Parenting Styles with Internet Addiction: Mediating Role of Moral Intelligence

In today’s digital world, there seems to be a thin line between technology use and abuse. There are many people who have extreme internet habits and abnormal moral behaviors. The purpose of this study was to determine the mediating role of moral intelligence in the relationship between perceived parenting styles and internet addiction of students in Qazvin province.               

The research method was correlation. The statistical population of all undergraduate and postgraduate students of Qazvin province universities in 2019, among them a sample of 270 students was selected by cluster random sampling method. The research tools were Baumrind Parenting Styles Questionnaire (1972), Young Internet Addiction (2011) and Moral Intelligence of Lennick and Kiel (2011). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including demographic indicators and inferential statistics, including path analysis pattern and Sobel test.

The results showed that moral intelligence has a mediating role between students' perceived parenting styles and their internet addiction. This means that moral intelligence has a significant inverse relationship with authoritarian and negligent parenting styles and Internet addiction, and has a significant positive relationship with authoritative parenting style and lack of internet addiction. Also, the proposed model had the desired fit to determine the relationship between the research variables.

Based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that training and promoting moral intelligence can be used as a prevention method or even a treatment method in the form of CBT techniques for internet addiction.