Gender Differences in and the Relationships Between Social Anxiety and Problematic Internet Use: Canonical Analysis.

On the basis of the findings, we conclude that enhanced educational opportunities for women and their increasing role in the society have led women to become more active and thus closed the gap in social anxiety levels between men and women. We found that men showed more difficulties than women in terms of running away from personal problems (ie, social benefit), used the Internet more excessively, and experienced more interpersonal problems with significant others due to Internet use. We conclude that men are under a greater risk of social impairments due to PIU. Our overall conclusion is that there is a substantial amount of association between social anxiety and PIU and the association is stronger for men than it is for women. We advise that future research continue to investigate PIU and social anxiety as multidimensional constructs.