This study aims to explore the potential heterogeneous categories of Problematic Internet Use (PIU) among college students and to compare differences in psychosocial indicators—specifically depression, peer relationships, and belief in a just world—across these categories. Using convenience sampling, 381 college students were surveyed. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was employed to identify latent categories based on five dimensions of PIU, followed by one-way ANOVA to examine differences in the indicators across the categories. The results revealed that college students’ PIU can be classified into four latent categories: Internet-addicted (11.5%), habitual excessive users (29.2%), adaptive users (36.1%), and healthy mastery users (23.2%). Comparative analysis showed that from the healthy mastery to the Internetaddicted category, levels of depression increased significantly, while the quality of peer relationships and the strength of belief in a just world decreased significantly. The findings indicate the existence of heterogeneous PIU categories among college students, and these categories are closely associated with psychosocial adjustment. This provides a basis for implementing targeted, tiered prevention and intervention strategies.
Jiang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.