Loneliness and Sensation-Seeking on Problematic Internet Use between Unmarried Early Adults

Abstract

The psychosocial development stage of early adulthood is intimacy versus isolation. Intimacy can be obtained through marriage. Many early adults cannot fulfill these stages, so they experience social isolation, which results in Loneliness, so individuals use the Internet as an escape media. Increased Internet use will cause problematic Internet use, where individuals cannot control themselves not to access the Internet, ultimately providing negative outcomes in everyday life. In addition, problematic Internet use is also often associated with Sensation-Seeking. This study aims to explore the role of Loneliness and Sensation-Seeking and their association with problematic Internet use in a sample of unmarried early adults. This study is a quantitative study using A Rasch-type Loneliness Scale by Gierveld & Tilburg (2006) with a reliability of 0.840, Arnett Inventory of Sensation-Seeking Scale (AISS) by Arnett (1994) with a reliability of 0.733, and The Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 (GPIUS2) by Caplan (2010) with a reliability of 0.903. Subjects in the study were selected using a purposive sampling technique totaling 111 unmarried early adults aged 22-33 years who are active in accessing social media in their daily lives. Hypotheses were analyzed using multiple regression analysis.