Exploratory Model of Internet Use in The COVID-19 Era

Abstract:   In the framework of the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 disease, the containment and mitigation policies of the pandemic consist of confinement and social distancing. In this strategy, the use of the Internet has been fundamental for remote work, although the measurement of Internet user activity is just in the study stage. The objective of this work was to establish the reliability and validity of the Internet Use Scale, an instrument that measures eight dimensions of Internet use. For this, a cross-sectional, correlational and psychometric study was carried out with a selection of 253 students from the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico where eight factors were established: selectivity, compatibility, computability, accessibility, extensionality, cumulativeness, anxiety and addiction, which explained the 59% of the total variance exposed. These eight factors were correlated with each other with their indicators to form a reflective structure of intensive Internet use. The adjustment and residual parameters suggested the non-rejection of the hypothesis about the significant differences between the structure of the dimensions reported in the literature with respect to the structure of the factors observed in the present work. Although these findings only apply to the sample, they recommend extension and contrast in other settings and with other study samples. The instrument is recommended for the empirical test of the proposed structural equation model with the eight reflective dimensions of Internet use.