Relationship of Sports Participation and Physical Activity with Internet Addiction; A Synthesis of Evidence

Abstract

Internet addiction has widely accepted as a psychiatric condition in research literature that is often characterized by negative psychological, social, and physical outcomes. While physical activity and sports participation is considered as assistive interventions for positive psychological, physical and social variables. This review aimed to assess the evidence concerning effectiveness of physical activity to reduce internet addiction. Research articles related to goal of this review were systematically searched in the eleven research data bases such as PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus, Medline, Cochrane library, Psych INFO, ERIC, Taylor & Francis, JSTOR, Springer Link, and Google scholar, up to February, 2019. After critical appraisal, twenty articles (nineteen cross-sectional and one qualitative study) identified with low or moderate risk of bias. Results of the seventeen studies provided support in favor of statistically significant inverse association between physical activity and internet addiction and three studies did not find any relationship. The findings of this review likely to suggest the effectiveness of physical activity as preventive measure to treat the internet addiction in youth studying at schools, colleges, and universities.