Socioeconomic and Geographic Inequalities of Internet Addiction in Korean Adolescents

The aim of this study was to evaluate the social economic and geographic influences on Internet addiction in Korean youth using the Korean Youth Risk Behavior Web-Based Survey. Middle and high school students (n=73,238) were randomly selected from the respondents to a web-based survey using two-stage stratified complex sampling. A Geographical Information System was used to generate a Korean map of the level of Internet addiction for each province and complex sampling lower case logistic regression was used to investigate the relationship between social economic status (SES) and Internet addiction. Gyeonggi-do and Gyeongsang-namdo provinces have a higher total scores of Internet addiction. There were associations between Internet addiction and low SES (OR=1.504, 95% CI 1.156-1.956, p<0.01). There may need to be at multilevel approach which recognizes the different levels of need in provinces as well as trying to understand why the differences arise at an individual level.