Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Dooley, Katherine

Committee Member

Morse, David

Committee Member

Wells, K. Debbie

Committee Member

Looby, Joan

Committee Member

Morse, Linda

Date of Degree

5-3-2008

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Counseling Education

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)

College

College of Education

Department

Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education

Abstract

Addiction and its staggering impact on today’s society is well established in literature. The existence of co-occuring addictions has been well documented by various researchers. Researchers found that the presence of co-occurring addictions in alcoholics predicted relapse and readmission to treatment for alcohol dependence, reinforcing the need to study the problems created by co-occuring addictions. In college students, there appears to be a clear tendency for addictions to occur together, with alcohol and high risk sexual behavior appearing to co-exist in this population. Today’s college students are deemed as technology savvy students; therefore, the Internet serves as a primary medium for their communication which means more time spent online. The Internet has been known for its sexual saturation, and today college students constantly use the computer, thus being exposed to this saturation. Current research found that students are online more often and are beginning to engage in online sexual behavior. Researchers found a tendency for college students to engage in cybersex related activity ranging from chatting to masturbation and even the development of offline relationships. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of cybersex and alcohol addiction in a sample of college students. In order to investigate the statement of the problem, several research questions existed for this study. This study examined prevalence rates of alcohol and cybersex addiction in this sample of college students and determined if a relationship existed between alcohol and cybersex addiction. The results of the research suggested that in this sample of college students, minimal participants met criterion for cybersex addiction and alcohol addiction. Findings show that these behaviors seemed to exist at some level in this sample of college students with 7.6% of the sample reporting that they felt that their online sexual behavior is out of control. This research demonstrated a more significant existence of alcohol abuse with 40% of the sample meeting criterion for alcohol abuse which validated that alcohol continues to be a prevalent problem with college students as previously determined by the existing research in the literature review.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/15056

Download

Share

COinS