Misc

We recently ran a little study to see what happens when you prevent a small group of students from using their smartphone for 24 hours. Participants were instructed to place their smartphone in a secure evidence bag. So what happened? Well not much really, they missed their smartphone.  As part of this study, we also asked participants to complete the Smartphone 'Addiction' Inventory (SPAI). Interestingly, a few participants who dropped out later in the study had fractionally higher SPAI scores. This may indicate that smartphone ‘addicts’ were unable to fully participate in the study and so discontinued, thus affecting our findings. However, this is unlikely given that smartphone addiction scales  do not align favourably with objective behaviour . It is worth noting that while this small number of participants were slightly more anxious at time 1 they were also on average, a bit happier. It's increasingly difficult to know exactly what these 'addiction...

We recently collected more smartphone usage data to test if pen and paper scales could predict behaviour ( they didn't ). However, in the process we managed to replicate some of our previous results from 2015. Specifically, the average number of smartphone pick-ups per day remains remarkably similar across both samples despite using different software and smartphone operating systems to quantify these behaviours. These results therefore cast some doubt over the idea that Android and iPhone users differ in their usage behaviours ( we previously observed some demographic and personality differences between these two groups ). Mean number of pick-ups from 2015 sample: 84.68 ( SD =55.23) . Mean number of pick-ups from 2018 sample: 85.44 ( SD =53.34) . It's worth remembering that our results in 2015 were already comparable with data collected by others in 2009 ! The idea that people are using their phones more doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.  ...