Is Mobile Addiction a Unique Addiction: Findings from an International Sample of University Students
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Is Mobile Addiction a Unique Addiction: Findings from an International Sample of University Students Mark Douglas Whitaker 1 & Suzana Brown 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract
This research explores whether addictions around mobile phones should be treated more as a physiological or a psychological problem. A new survey about mobile addiction and time use (MATU), constructed from several studies, tests to what degree time use on mobile phones (a physiological cause) is correlated with four behavioral factors predicting proneness to addiction, respectively one physiological problem and three psychological problems: sensation seeking, impulsiveness, anxiety, and hopelessness. Equally, an index on how strongly students interpret that they have a mobile addiction problem was tested for whether it was correlated to the same four factors. A sample of 1219 students was drawn from four universities, three in the USA and one in South Korea. Correlations between six indexes were analyzed. Students who think they have a “mobile phone time use problem” do not report high (physiological) sensation seeking at all (0.18, p < 0.01) yet have higher correlations only with three psychological problems: impulsiveness (0.64, p < 0.01), hopelessness (0.47, p < 0.01), and anxiety (0.31, p < 0.01). On the other hand, the exact inverse occurs among actual sensation seekers with high time use (0.85, p < 0.01) who lack high correlations with three psychological problems (each below 0.15, p < .01). The pattern held across four different universities and two countries with minimal variations. Mobile addictions appear to be two different types of individualized problems instead of one: physiological problems for some (without major psychological problems) and psychological problems for others (without high time use). This research may help influence policy to target different individual problems in mobile addiction. Keywords Mobile . Addiction . Etiology . Psychological . Physiological . Policy
* Mark Douglas Whitaker [email protected]
1
Department of Technology and Society, Stony Brook University, SUNY Korea, Incheon, Incheon Global Campus, B310, 119 SongdoMoonhwa-Ro, Yeonsu-gu 406-840, South Korea
International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
One of the unintended consequences of recent technological development is that addictions started to appear around fresh digital technologies—starting with the Internet, then to online games, and more recently to mobile devices. It is not uncommon to see people staring at their phone, for one reason or the other, in almost all situations. However, a question remains if existing models of drug addiction can apply to these newer digital addictions or should models of addiction be updated (Weinstein and Lejoyeux 2010). Regardless, there is a growing concern among researchers, educators, and parents about impacts of mobile phones on the wellbeing and educational outcomes of school age children from middle school through college (Jun 2016
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