In een studie van de universiteit van Misouri werd het internetgebruik van 216 universiteitsstudenten gevolgd waarvan men vaststelde dat 30% leden aan een depressie volgens de Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale.

Wat zijn de resultaten?

De onderzoekers stelden vast dat depressie correleert met meer video en gaming activiteit. (correlatie is geen causaliteit) Depressieve jongeren zijn ook duidelijk meer online dan hun gezonde studiegenoten, ze bezoeken ook meer gezondheidsgerelateerde websites, chatrooms, sociale netwerken en goksites.

Men merkte ook dat depressieve studenten meer muziek, video’s en foto’s online deelden. Ze zoeken naar steun in chatrooms om hun gevoelens van isolement te overwinnen. Ze checken ook zeer vaak hun email en gebruiken alle tools tot heel laat in de nacht.

Abstract van het onderzoek dat je hier gratis kan downloaden:

Depression is a serious mental health problem affecting a large population of college students. Since college students extensively use the Internet, the Psychological Sciences community is investigating associations between Depression and
Internet usage. While existing studies provide insightful conclusions, the Internet usage in these studies is characterized by surveys alone, hence yielding limited insights. In this paper, we report our findings on a month long experiment conducted at
Missouri University of Science and Technology on associating depressive symptoms among college students with their Internet usage using real Internet data collected in an unobtrusive and privacy preserving manner over the campus network. In our study, 216 undergraduates were surveyed for depressive symptoms using the CES-D scale. We then collected their oncampus Internet usage characterized via Cisco NetFlow data. Subsequent analysis revealed that several Internet usage features like average packets per flow, peer-to-peer (octets, packets and duration), chat octets, mail (packets and duration), ftp duration, and remote file octets exhibit a statistically significant correlation with depressive symptoms. Additionally, Mann-Whitney U-tests revealed that average packets per flow, remote file octets, chat(octets, packets and duration) and flow duration entropy have a statistically significant difference in the mean values across groups with and without depressive symptoms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that associates depressive symptoms among college students with their real Internet usage.