The effectiveness of media literacy education on problematic use of the Internet, deviant behaviors and relationships with peers in students

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of media literacy training on problematic use of the Internet, deviant behaviors and relationships with peers in adolescents. The research design was a semi-experimental pre-test-post-test with a control group and a one-month follow-up. The statistical population was girls' high school students in Tehran in the academic year 2018-2019, from which 40 people were selected by available sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental groups (20 people) and control group (20 people). They were replaced. The experimental group underwent media literacy training for 10 one-hour sessions and the control group remained on the waiting list. To collect data, the screening scale of high-risk and problem-causing use of the Internet by Jelenchik et al., the deviant behavior scale of Rostami and Firouz Rad, and the peer relations scale of Rigby and Slee were used. Data analysis was done with the statistical method of mixed variance analysis based on SPSS.21 software. The results of the research showed a significant difference between the mean scores of problematic Internet use, deviant behaviors and relationships with peers in the post-test and follow-up. Therefore, media literacy training has a striking effect on the problematic use of the Internet, deviant behaviors and relationships with peers in teenagers, and it can be used as an effective and useful method to reduce the social and academic problems of students.