Socially Connected but Still Isolated: Smartphone Addiction Decreases Social Support Over Time

Abstract

Recent literature has suggested that smartphone addiction is negatively associated with users’ psychosocial well-being. Much of the research on this subject, however, is of a correlational nature, which has been pointed out as an important limitation that does not allow distinguishing the antecedents of the consequences. In this study, 416 smartphone users were followed for 1 year (three waves separated by 6 months each) to assess the relationship between smartphone addiction and social support. Cross-lagged model results indicated that social support predicts later addiction to the smartphone and that smartphone addiction decreases social support over time. Growth mixture model results indicated that the decrease in social support during the follow-up year was higher for users with greater smartphone addiction at the beginning of the study. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance indicated that some personal characteristics of users (extroversion, neuroticism, and sensation-seeking) could affect the evolution of social support related to smartphone addiction. In general, these results suggest that the extensive use of a social communication technology such as the smartphone could have the paradoxical effect of diminishing the psychosocial well-being of its users.

Smartphone Addiction and Social Support: A Three-year Longitudinal Study

“…The studies on smartphone addiction represent a continuation of the first studies on addiction to the Internet and to mobile phones and share some of their premises (Herrero et al, 2017a;Herrero, Urueña, Torres, & Hidalgo 2019). For example, these studies share the idea that communication technologies can lead to social isolation, which has negative consequences for well-being.…”

“…For these authors, addicted users presented a need for constant access to information about their social relationships that in the end could be difficult to control over time and might lead to a behavioral addiction. In other words, the need to obtain social support in these users increased their potential risk of smartphone addiction (see Herrero et al, 2019;van Deursen, Bolle, Hegner, & Kommers, 2015).…”

“…The second area of research explores how this type of behavioral addiction can socially isolate users and reduce their levels of social support. Smartphones offer so many functionalities for communication that they could have the paradoxical effect of isolating users: as we can communicate with everyone and all times, in the end, we communicate poorly with everyone, which affects our ability to create and maintain support ties (Herrero et al, 2019). From this view, the addiction to smartphones in addition paradoxically erodes users' social world, because of the extensive use of -and potential addiction to -a social communication technology.…”

“…It was not until the first longitudinal investigations that it was possible to unravel the type of relationship between smartphone addiction and social support. Empirical research conducted using longitudinal design from this perspective (Herrero et al, 2019) has shown that addiction relates to a reduction in social support over time. Herrero et al (2019) found in a Spanish national representative sample of 416 smartphone users that the previous levels of addiction influenced the evolution of social support.…”

“…Empirical research conducted using longitudinal design from this perspective (Herrero et al, 2019) has shown that addiction relates to a reduction in social support over time. Herrero et al (2019) found in a Spanish national representative sample of 416 smartphone users that the previous levels of addiction influenced the evolution of social support. Specifically, these authors found using growth mixture modeling techniques that users with higher levels of addiction evidenced a greater reduction of social support in the following 12 months.…”