Teacher-student relationships and smartphone addiction: the roles of achievement goal orientation and psychological resilience

Smartphone addiction has become an urgent problem for college students. Teacher-student relationships are important factors affecting smartphone addiction, but the mechanism is not clear, and the subjects of the most existing studies are primary and secondary school students. Therefore, this study developed and tested a model of teacher-student relationships and smartphone addiction of college students. It further investigated the mediating effect of achievement goal orientation and the moderating effect of psychological resilience. This study recruited 598 Chinese college students from freshmen to seniors, aging from 17 to 25, with the help of the Teacher-Student Relationships Questionnaire, Achievement Goal Oriented Questionnaire, Psychological Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and Smartphone Addiction Scale for College Students (SAS-C) questionnaire, which are completed during the period of their computer experiments. The results indicated that, (a) after controlling the factors of gender, age, grade etc., teacher-student relationships exerted negative prediction on smartphone addiction. (b) Achievement goal orientation played a partial mediating role in the relationship between teacher-student relationships and smartphone addiction of college students. (c) The relationship between teacher-student relationships and smartphone addiction was moderated by psychological resilience — for college students with high psychological resilience teacher-student relationships had a more prominent negative effect on smartphone addiction. This study has application value for guiding college students to improve their achievement goals and reduce the tendency of smartphone addiction.