Development and validation of the Self-Administered Internet Addiction Scale (SAIAS-10)

Abstract

The number of people using the internet has skyrocketed during the past two decades, making screen addiction a threat greater than substance addiction. Clinical instances of screen addiction symptoms have emerged in the midst of the rising social media popularity. The existing scales for assessing screen addiction are dated and are lengthy, hence our primary objective was to develop a novel brief self-diagnostic scale that can detect internet addiction disorder. Our secondary objective is to conduct psychometric evaluations of this scale. The scale was administered to a total of 1057 participants (493 males, 564 females) with ages ranging from 14-24 years of age. Face and content validity, reliability, and internal consistency were assessed. Participants did not report any difficulty in understanding the questions. The final version of the scale comprises 10 items. A content validity index of 1, a Pearson correlation value of 0.98, and a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.923 were obtained. Findings suggest the SAIAS-10 is a reliable and valid tool for screening screen addiction and may aid in the clinical evaluation of symptomology and research.