Phone Addiction

Phone Addiction

Reviewed by Reja Batool

Phone addiction is the label for heavy phone use modelled on an addiction framework. Researchers who use it have built scales to measure it, and other researchers argue that the evidence does not support the addiction label and prefer the wider term problematic smartphone use. The two groups agree that some people find phone use hard to manage and differ on the name.

What it is

The phrase appears in everyday speech and in research papers, and the two do not always mean the same thing. In research it usually refers to a pattern of answers on a questionnaire, scored against criteria borrowed from addiction frameworks.

One early instrument was the smartphone addiction scale published by Min Kwon and colleagues in PLoS ONE in 2013. They built it on a Korean scale for internet addiction and on features specific to smartphones. In their study 197 adult volunteers aged 18 to 53 completed it alongside other questionnaires, and the authors reported that it was reliable and valid.

A 2020 systematic review by Bethany Harris and colleagues counted 78 scales developed over 13 years to measure excessive or problematic smartphone use. The Why We article Is phone addiction real sets that count beside the scale papers and the critical reviews.

In effect

Tayana Panova and Xavier Carbonell reviewed quantitative and qualitative research on smartphone use in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions in 2018. They concluded that most studies assume smartphone addiction exists, that the evidence does not support the claim from an addiction standpoint, and that excessive use, difficulty controlling impulses and negative outcomes do not on their own justify the label. They proposed problematic use as the term.

Joël Billieux and colleagues, in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy in 2015, described one person's heavy phone use in two ways: a symptom-based description drawn from the addiction model and a process-based description built around that person's own psychological processes. They argued that the process-based description captured more.

Read side by side, the papers differ less on whether the behaviour exists than on what to call it.

What it does not say

The papers on this page measure and label phone use. They do not report outcomes for any individual, and nothing here is advice about anyone's own use of a phone. A score on a scale records a pattern of answers, and whether that pattern is addiction is the contested question.

The Gazzaley and Rosen book The Distracted Mind approaches device use through attention, a separate question from the one the label raises.

Sources

  1. Kwon, M., Lee, J.-Y., Won, W.-Y., Park, J.-W., Min, J.-A., Hahn, C., Gu, X., Choi, J.-H., & Kim, D.-J. (2013). Development and validation of a smartphone addiction scale (SAS). PLoS ONE, 8(2), e56936. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056936
  2. Harris, B., Regan, T., Schueler, J., & Fields, S. A. (2020). Problematic mobile phone and smartphone use scales: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 672. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00672
  3. Panova, T., & Carbonell, X. (2018). Is smartphone addiction really an addiction? Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 7(2), 252-259. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.49
  4. Billieux, J., Philippot, P., Schmid, C., Maurage, P., De Mol, J., & Van der Linden, M. (2015). Is dysfunctional use of the mobile phone a behavioural addiction? Confronting symptom-based versus process-based approaches. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 22(5), 460-468. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.1910