Motives of Use and Internet Addiction: Development and Evidence of Validity of a Scale to Evaluate Motives of Internet Use

The motives for Internet use are crucial to understanding why people get and stay online despite negative consequences. This study aimed to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of a questionnaire of Internet use motives in Spanish and its relationship with Internet addiction. The sample (N = 417) was divided into two subsamples: the first one used to perform a confirmatory factor analysis and the second one to cross-validate the retained model. Multi-group analysis by age and gender yielded evidence of invariance. The final questionnaire contains 20 items with a 5-factor structure with good psychometric properties. Finally, a structural equation model was fitted to evaluate the relationship between motives of Internet use and Internet addiction, in which a significant association was observed between coping, enhancement, and utility motives with Internet addiction. The questionnaire of Internet use motives (MUI) is useful to get reliable evaluation of motives for Internet use in Spanish-speaking population.