Development & standardization of a scale to measure smartphone addiction among college students

Abstract

In today’s lifestyle due to increased use of smartphone, problems related to mental health is also increasing day by day.Thus there is urgent need to measure the addiction of smartphone in college going students who are considered more susceptible to the addiction. As in India, there are fewer tools available for measuring addiction in young adults so there is a need to develop a scale for measuring the addiction of smartphone users. For developing the scale, 26 items were selected on the basis of expert’s agreement and content validity was established. After analysis of items total 16 items were included in final scale with 3 point rating. The split- half method was used for measuring the reliability of the scale. The final addiction scale was administered on 100 (50 Boys & 50 Girls) randomly selected college going students of 18-24 years to measure the smartphone addiction.The reliability of the scale was high with the correlation coefficient of 0.97. For internal consistency Reliability of the final smartphone scale, Cronbach's alpha correlation coefficient 0.924 was obtained. Majority of students 48 percent were having low addiction and only 9 percent students were highly addicted and there was significant difference between addiction level of boys and girls, boys are more addicted than girls.The Smartphone Addiction Scale showed good reliability and validity for the assessment of smartphone addiction in college students which can be used efficiently for the assessment of smartphone addiction in clinical and research areas.