French adaptation of the Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire

Objectives. - This research proposes a French adaptation of the Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire (PIUQ) (Demetrovics et al., 2008) for young adults. Methods. - The translation and adaptation followed the major steps recommended by Vallerand (1989), which mean a work of face validity with a back translation, a psychometric study with exploratory, confirmatory and fidelity analyses. This research included four studies with a total of 484 subjects. Results. - Component Principal Analysis (CPA) shows that the French adaptation of the PIUQ is composed of 12 items. Confirmatory factorial analysis in studies 3 and 4 shows a satisfactory indicator and confirms a structure of four dimensions. Correlations between the score of the PIUQ-F42 and the anxiety, in one hand and the Internet Addiction Test (IAT), on the other hand, is meaningful and positive what reinforces the validity of this tool. Conclusion. - This questionnaire (PIUQ-F-12) will be able to assess the presence of the problematic use of the Internet in a population of teenagers or young adults. With its short number of items, it can be quickly used at intake to support the evaluation. It will be as interesting to test this tool for a Problematic Internet Use screening in a clinical setting. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.