Internet addiction increases poor sleep quality among high school students

Objective: Good sleep quality is important for human health. Internet addiction can disrupt sleep quality. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the use of online communication tools, internet addiction and poor sleep quality. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Mersin in 2016. The universe of the research consisted of 55043 high school students. Based on minimum sampling, it was planned to include 1110 people in the study, but in actuality, 1061 people participated. Descriptive statistics, chi-square, t test, Mann Whitney U, Binary Logistic Regression analysis and Classification and Regression Tree analysis were employed during the data processing. Results: A total of 1061 students, of which 531 (50.0%) were females, participated in the research, with an average age of 16.6±1.2 years. Out of all the participants, 65.6% had personal computers, 87.0% had personal mobile phones and 90.4% of these participants had access to the Internet via their mobile phones. Among all, 58.6% were found to be suffering from poor sleep quality. Studied factors like internet addiction (OR=2.31), being female (OR=1.95) and having conflict with parents due to excessive internet use (OR=1.95) were found to be the contributing factors which diminished sleep quality. Furthermore, it has been shown in the classification and regression tree analyses that internet addiction is the most significant determinant of poor sleep quality. Conclusion: The co-occurrence of prevalent poor sleep quality and internet addiction among the participants of the study may be a strong evidence of the link between internet addiction and poor sleep quality. Keywords: Internet, addiction, sleep, adolescenc