psychometric properties of young’s internet addiction test in nigeria

Background: in 2018, the nigerian communication commission affirmed that more than 100 million nigerians made use of the internet. a good percentage of internet usage is maladaptive. a valid, reliable, and socioculturally sensitive assessment instrument is essential to study internet usage patterns in nigeria. young’s internet addiction test (iat) has been validated in many countries, but not in nigeria.objectives: this study aimed to validate iat to determine psychometric properties acceptable in a nigerian population.materials and methods: a total of 184 nigerian university undergraduates (77 males and 107 females), mean age = 20.5, were purposively drawn, and they responded to iat, the smartphone addiction scaleshort version (sassv), and the bergen facebook addiction scale (bfas). results: the cronbach’s α of the six iat factors ranged from 0.25 (anticipation) to 0.69 (salience). the observed overall cronbach’s α coefficient of 0.79 was obtained for iat. the corrected itemtotal correlations ranged from 0.73 to 0.84. the concurrent validity score was observed to be r = 0.54 between iat and sassv and r = 0.58 between iat and bfas. a significant positive correlation was equally observed between the iat and bfas factors, ranging from conflict (r = 0.322, p = 0.000) to relapse (r = 0.488, p = 0.000). the new norm determined for iat in the nigerian population was ≥ 38.5 for males and ≥ 40.8 for females.conclusions: iat is gendersensitive and has acceptable psychometric properties for the nigerian population.