Evaluation of mobile phone addiction level and sleep quality in university students

Abstract

Objective: To determine the mobile phone addiction level in university students, to examine several associated factors and to evaluate the relation between the addiction level and sleep quality. Methods: The study is a cross-sectional research conducted on the students of the Sakarya University between 01 November 2012 and 01 February 2013. The study group included 576 students. The Problematic Mobile Phone Use Scale was used for evaluating the mobile phone addiction level and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for assessing the sleep quality. Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test and Spearman’s Correlation Analysis were used for analyzing the data. Results: The study group consisted of 296 (51.4%) females and 208 (48.6%) males. The mean age was 20.83 ± 1.90 years (min:17, max:28). The addiction level was determined to be higher in the second-year students, those with poor family income, those with type A personality, those whose age for first mobile phone is 13 and below and those whose duration of daily mobile phone use is above 5 hours (p < 0.05 for each). The sleep quality worsens with increasing mobile phone addiction level (p < 0.05). Conclusion: The sleep quality worsens with increasing addiction level. It was concluded that referring the students with suspected addiction to advanced healthcare facilities, performing occasional scans for early diagnosis and informing the students about controlled mobile phone use would be useful.

Is Smartphone Addiction Associated with a Younger Age at First Use in University Students?

“…In addition, Brezing et al (2010) in their review of behavioral addictions in youth alluded to the positive association between depression and problematic internet use in adolescents and college students, where internet use is used as a coping strategy. Likewise, we had similar expectation with regard to the effect of personality type A; once more presumed by findings from earlier studies revealing significant positive association between neurotic personality trait and smartphone addiction in Korean college students (Mok et al, 2014), personality type A and problematic mobile phone use in Turkish university students (Sahin et al, 2013), and type A behavior traits and mobile phone dependence after adjustment for health-related lifestyle habits and depressive state in Japanese medical university students (Masahiro & Satoko, 2013).…”

“…Our findings from correlation analysis of a significant positive association between younger age at first use and development of smartphone addiction are comparable to those of Orsal et al (2013) and Sahin et al (2013) which revealed significant associations between younger age at first use of internet (≤ 9 vs. 10-12 vs. ≥ 13 years) and higher internet addiction median score, and between younger age at first mobile phone use (≤13 vs. ≥16 years) and higher mobile phone addiction median score in Turkish university students, respectively. However, they were unlike those of Darcin et al (2016) who did not find any significant correlation between earlier age at first smartphone use and smartphone addiction among a sample of Turkish university students.…”

“…Slutske et al (2014) revealed an inverse association between earlier age of initiation of gambling during childhood and adolescence and the likelihood of gambling disorder in adulthood. Sahin, Ozdemir, Unsal, & Temiz (2013) showed problematic mobile phone use to be statistically significantly associated with younger age at first mobile phone use (≤13 vs. ≥16 years) in Turkish university students (n=576, mean age= 20.8 years).…”

“…In addition only two studies examined the effect, and not the independent effect, of age at first use of a mobile phone on subsequent development of mobile phone addiction (Darcin et al, 2016;Sahin et al, 2013). This study aims to examine the independent association between age at first use and smartphone addiction score among a sample of Lebanese university students.…”

Üniversite öğrencileri için Problemli Cep Telefonu Kullanım Ölçeği’nin geliştirilmesi: Geçerlik ve güvenirlik analizleri

“…Even though according to the above-mentioned TUIK, mobile telephone use in Turkey is very high, there are only recent and few studies regarding the problematic use of mobile phones (5,9,(13)(14)(15)(16)(26)(27)(28)(29). For problematic mobile phone use in Turkey, we can find two adapted instruments (26,28) and one scale developed for adolescents (29).…”