Effect of Social Capital on Internet Addiction among Eastern Azerbaijan High School Students

In today’s postmodern era, internet acts like a double-edged sword; creating both opportunities and threats. According to scholars, internet specially provides users in cyberspace with new opportunities and facilities to increase their social capital. But these opportunities and facilities if not properly used or used excessively, will deteriorate consequences such as internet addiction, weakening of user’s real world social capital, and social isolation. Therefore, in the present work, we have tried to evaluate the impact of social capital on Internet addiction among high school students in East Azerbaijan.
Research method was based on survey and aclosed questionnaire was used as measurement tool.Our population included 204,562 of East Azerbaijan high school studentsupon which a Multi-stage cluster sampling was conducted based on Cochran formula and a sample size of 664 individuals was obtained.
Research findings indicate that the amount of social capital and the rate of Internet addiction among students was higher than average. Regression analysis results also revealed that two aspects of social trust and social relation networks from social capital aspects, explain more than 30 percent of variances in dependent variable (internet addiction) among high school students.