The Prevalence of Smartphone Addiction and its Relationship with Personality Traits, Loneliness and Daily Stress of Students in Jahrom University of Medical Sciences in 2014: A Cross-sectional Analytical Study
Author(s): Leili Mosalanejad, Ghazale Nikbakht, Saead Abdollahifrad and Navid Kalani*
Abstract
Introduction: The world of technology is growing. Smartphones are one of today's most important social media technologies. The purpose of this study is to determine the prevalence of smartphone addiction and its relationship with personality traits, loneliness, and daily stress of students of Jahrom University of Medical Sciences in 2014.
Methodology: This is a random, cross-sectional, analytical study on 233 students of Jahrom University of Medical Sciences. These students were randomly selected. Smartphone Addiction Inventory was used to examine the prevalence of smartphone addiction. Loneliness Scale, Stress Resources Questionnaire and Daily Stress Inventory (DSI) were used to measure the extent of loneliness and stress. NEO Personality Inventory-Revised was employed to find the relationship between the personality traits and smartphone addiction. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and statistical tests (t-test and Chi-square) were used to analyze the data in SPSS v.19.
Results: The results indicate that 97.8% of students are addicted to smartphones. According to the t-test, loneliness and daily stress have no significant relationship with the smartphone addiction (p-value>0.05). However, loneliness and daily stress are higher among the addicted students. According to multivariate regression, conscientiousness, which is a dimension of personality traits, is found to have a significant relationship with the smartphone addiction. It determines 57% of the variance (p-value<0.05).
Conclusion: Most of the participants are addicted to smartphones, assigned into the "conscientious" type.