Relationships between Smartphone Addiction and Smartphone Usage Types, Depression, ADHD, Stress, Interpersonal Problems, and Parenting Attitude with Middle School Students

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between smartphone addiction of middle school students and smartphone usage types, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), stress, interpersonal problems, and parenting attitude. In particular, we wanted to find out how smartphone usage types predict smartphone addiction when controlling depression, ADHD, perceived stress, interpersonal problems, and parenting attitudes, which are the main predictors of existing smartphone addiction in this study. Methods: The subjects of this study included 487 local middle school students (253 girls and 234 boys). The measurement instruments used were the smartphone addiction scale, patient health questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), Korean ADHD rating scales (K-ARS), perceived stress scale (PSS), Short form of the Korean-inventory of interpersonal problems circumplex scales (KIIP-SC), and the parenting attitude scale. We identified the relationships between the variables with correlation analysis and examined the predictors of smartphone addiction with hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Result: The factors that influence smartphone addiction were sex (beta = 3.14, P < 0.01), stress (beta = 2.99, P < 0.01), and interpersonal problems (beta = 3.81, P < 0.001). In addition, when the confounding variables of smartphone addiction were controlled to examine the effects of smartphone usage types on smartphone addiction, social network service (SNS) (beta = 2.66, P < 0.01) and music/videos (beta = 2.73, P < 0.01) were found to significantly positively affect smartphone addiction, whereas study (beta = -2.54, P < 0.05) had a significantly negatively effect. And these factors explained 29.5% of the variance in smartphone addiction. Conclusion: The order of the usage types with the highest influence on smartphone addiction was: enjoying music/videos, SNS, and study. This suggests that selective intervention depending on the main smartphone usage type can be effective.