Reflective smartphone disengagement: Conceptualization, measurement, and validation

Digital well-being in an age of mobile connectivity: An introduction to the Special Issue

“…In both media effects and media studies research, digital disconnection is both implicitly (e.g., Vanden Abeele, 2021) and explicitly (e.g., Fast, 2021;Nguyen, 2021) recognized as an act that might be conducive to digital well-being. 2 In media effects research, for instance, a growing number of studies explore the effects of limiting-mostly mobile -connectivity on well-being and its associated outcomes, often using synonymous or adjacent concepts to digital disconnection such as "smartphone abstinence" (Wilcockson et al, 2019), "social media abstinence" (Hall, Xing, et al, 2021), "digital detox" (Schmuck, 2020), and "smartphone disengagement" (Matthes et al, 2021). In media studies research, the notion that individuals disconnect to restore their well-being is, for instance, recognized in narratives on digital detoxing, that often emphasize a nostalgic desire to return to the "good life" that we had before the advent of mobile connectivity (e.g.…”

Promoting users’ smartphone avoidance intention: the role of health beliefs

“…Given the pervasiveness of smartphone use as well as its negative impacts on users' health, researchers, albeit few, began to pay attention to smartphone avoidance behavior as well as the influencing factors. In related studies, researchers used other terms to delineate users' deliberate disconnection from smartphones, such as information system discontinuance (Turel, 2015), mobile shunning behavior (Shin and Shin, 2016), smartphone withdrawal (Tams et al, 2018) and reflective smartphone disengagement (Matthes et al, 2022). For example, Shin and Shin (2016) investigated mobile shunning behavior and found that mobile messenger overload positively affected mobile messenger fatigue, which subsequently triggered mobile communicators' shunning behavior.…”

“…For example, Shin and Shin (2016) investigated mobile shunning behavior and found that mobile messenger overload positively affected mobile messenger fatigue, which subsequently triggered mobile communicators' shunning behavior. Matthes et al (2022) advanced a new concept called reflective smartphone disengagement to delineate individuals' conscious efforts to control and restrict smartphone use, and developed a corresponding measurement scale with good validity. Considering the growing need for controlling smartphone use and the lack of empirical evidence in extant literature, this study endeavors to contribute to this research area by offering a new perspective (i.e.…”

“…Busch and McCarthy, 2021;Horwood and Anglim, 2019) with limited research being conducted on how to reverse the trend (e.g. Loid et al, 2020;Matthes et al, 2022). Although there is no consensus on the terminology characterizing users' deliberate disengagement from smartphones, this phenomenon is receiving increasing attention in recent years (Chen et al, 2020;Matthes et al, 2022;Shin and Shin, 2016).…”

“…As a conscious self-regulation mechanism, smartphone avoidance has been argued as one of the coping strategies against problematic smartphone use (Chen et al, 2020;Matthes et al, 2022;Turel, 2015). Despite the growing attention to smartphone avoidance, research on its determinants is still in a nascent stage.…”