Measures and the Initial Item Pool

The initial item pool of CAT-IA consisted of 101 items (see Table 2). These items were selected from four standardized scales: IAT (Young, 1998), GPIUS (Caplan, 2002), GAS (Lemmens et al., 2009), and Chinese Internet Addiction Test (CIAT; Huang et al., 2007). All of them used five-point Likert-type item scores (never, rarely, sometimes, often, always; scored with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively). A higher cumulative sum in all of the items represented more severe symptoms of IA. Based on previous studies, 101 items from the four selected standardized scales could be classified into seven domains (Young, 1998; Caplan, 2002; Huang et al., 2007; Lemmens et al., 2009): salience, tolerance, mood modification, relapse, withdrawal, negative outcomes, and benefits (i.e., compared with offline, individuals are more likely to participate in social behavior online and surfing the internet can reduce negative emotions).

Items from four scales.