Nearly four in 10 university students addicted to smartphones, study finds – By Denis Campbell (The Guardian) / Mar 2 2021
Research finds students who showed signs of addiction were also highly likely to suffer from poor sleep
Almost four in 10 university students are addicted to their smartphones, and their habit plays havoc with their sleep, research has found.
A study of 1,043 students aged 18-30 at King’s College London found that 406 (38.9%) displayed symptoms of smartphone addiction, as defined by a clinical tool devised to diagnose the problem.
More than two-thirds (68.7%) of the addicts had trouble sleeping, compared with 57.1% of those who were not addicted to their device. Students who used their phone after midnight or for four or more hours a day were most likely to be at high risk of displaying addictive use of their device.
Participants were judged to be addicts if they could not control how long they spent on their phone, felt distressed when they could not access their phone, or neglected other, more meaningful parts of their life because they were busy on their device.
