The purpose of this study is to examine moderating effects of parental monitoring on the relationship between elementary School students' daily stress and smart phone addiction. For this purpose, the study questions established were as follows; firstl...
The purpose of this study is to examine moderating effects of parental monitoring on the relationship between elementary School students' daily stress and smart phone addiction. For this purpose, the study questions established were as follows; firstly, what are the smart-phone use behaviors of the elementary school students like? Secondly, what is the relationship between the daily stress of the elementary school students, monitoring by their parents, and smart-phone addiction? Thirdly, what is the moderating effect of the parental monitoring in the relationship between the daily stress of the students and smart-phone addiction?
The participants in this study were selected from three elementary schools located in Gyounggi-do region in Korea. From these schools, 4th to 6th grade elementary school students who were using smart-phones were accepted as the study subjects. A total of 341 survey question aires were answered by the sample group children, and the result was analyzed using SPSS 17.0 software to performde scriptiv estatistical analysis, Pearson Correlation-Coefficient analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The finding sin this study are summarized as follows;
Firstly, as for the smart-phone use behavior of elementary school students, the largest portion of the students has used smart-phones for the past 6 months to 1 year. The reason of using smart phones was, mostly, because their parents bought them one. The average duration of smart-phone session was 2 to 3 hours, which mainly happened between after school and evening time. The use of smart-phone mainly took place at the residences of the subjects, while the most frequently used feature of the phones was gaming, which accounted for 16.4%.
Secondly, in terms of the relationship between the daily stress, parental monitoring, and smart-phone addiction, correlation between the daily stress and its lower factors, such as stress from the parents, stress from family environments, stress from the peer group, stress related to studying, and stress from the teacher or school, and the parental supervision was statistically significant at the significance level of 0.01 and 0.05, which revealed that there is a statistically significant correlation between all factors.
Thirdly, as a result of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis to find out the moderating effect of parental monitoring on the relationship between daily stress of the elementary school students and smart-phone addiction, parental monitoring could, in the relationship between the daily stress and smart-phone addiction, mitigate the addiction while the daily stress may negatively affect the addiction.
In this study, it was discovered that the daily stress of elementary school students may have a negative impact on smart-phone addiction. The implication of this study would be that we now know the parents should have a deeper understanding on the developmental characteristics of their children and the risk of using smart-phones to guide them away from addiction in a careful manner.