Relationship Among Family Cohesion, Psychological Separation And Internet Addition In University Students

The rapid spread of cyberspace brings about better ways of social communication, promotes working efficiency, enriches the after school life, while also creates some problems, especially IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder). It is believed that both the family and individual factors are related to the IAD. So research the relationship of family cohesion, representing the family emotional bonding, and psychological separation, the college students'core developmental task, will deepen the understanding of IAD.This study investigated a total of 819 university students from freshman to senior. Measures used in this investigation about the relationship of the family cohesion, psychological separation, and IAD were the Chinese Internet Addiction Scale (Shuhui Chen, 2003), the Family Environment Scale (Moos, 1981), together with the Psychological Separation Inventory (Hoffman, 1984). The results mainly indicated that: (1) there were influence of gender, grade, major and local in IAD; (2) the gender and the local had the interactive effects on the family cohesion, additionally the psychological separation and IAD were different in diverse grades of family cohesion; (3) there were distinctions between the psychological separation with father and that with mother, additionally there were gender and grade difference in psychological separation; (4) the family cohesion had directly negative effect on IAD; (5) the functional independence with father and mother, the emotional independence with mother, and the attitudinal independence with father positively predicted IAD, as well as the conflict independence with mother had strongly negative effect on IAD; (6) the family cohesion could positively predict the positive psychological separation, and had indirect effect on IAD by the negative effects of positive psychological separation; (7) the family cohesion could also negatively predict the general psychological separation, and had indirect effect on IAD by the positive effects of general psychological separation. The research results showed that college kids were susceptible population to IAD, in addition their IAD related with family emotional bonding and their special developmental task psychological separation.