Design and Evaluation of an Instrument to Measure Internet use During the COVID-19 Era

In the context of the pandemic caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease, the policies to contain and mitigate it consist of isolation and social distancing. As part of these strategies, internet use has been fundamental for telecommuting; however, measuring internet activity is an incipient field of research. The aim of this study is to design and evaluate an instrument to measure internet use during the COVID-19 era. For that purpose, a survey was conducted with 253 students from the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico. To verify the validity of the content of the items included in the survey, a Delphi analysis was carried out; and, to verify the validity of the constructs, several statistics were calculated, e.g., Cronbach’s alpha, KMO, and chi-squared, among others. Finally, a confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the eight dimensions that had been previously identified in the literature: selectivity, compatibility, computability, accessibility, extensionality, cumulativeness, anxiety, and addiction. They explain 59% of the total variance that was found. Although these findings are applicable only to this sample, the results obtained in this study provide evidence of the psychometric properties of the instrument, which can be used to make comparisons with other contexts and samples.