Youth smartphone addiction has lately emerged as one of social issues, which gives rise to physical and mental problems. Adolescents are very curious and prone to addiction. They are vulnerable to external environments such as family or school circums...
Youth smartphone addiction has lately emerged as one of social issues, which gives rise to physical and mental problems. Adolescents are very curious and prone to addiction. They are vulnerable to external environments such as family or school circumstances, emotionally sensitive and lack self-control. In a word, they are quite impressionable. Specifically, they face a lot of difficulty in terms of relationship with parents in this period, and they have a tendency to immerse themselves in something like smartphones. They are still under the heavy influence of their parents, and it could be inferred from the fact that their smartphone addiction would be affected by personal factors including gender, grade of school, family economy, economic activities of parents, hours for smartphone use and family rules related to smartphone use, and that their vulnerability would closely be bound up with their relationship with parents. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to examine the possible impact of the dissatisfaction of adolescents with the parental attitude of their parents on smartphone addiction
When related theories were analyzed, it's found that the personal factors of teens and parental attitude that is important in their relationship with parents are linked to smartphone addiction. The subjects in this study were the teens who were selected by purposive sampling from the students who were in their 4th to 6th grades in elementary schools, who were in their first to third years in middle schools and who were in their first to third years in high schools. All the elementary and secondary schools were located in the metropolitan area including Seoul. To test the hypothesis of the study, frequency analysis, independent-samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were carried out.
The findings of the study were as follows: As for the personal factors, hours for smartphone use exerted a positive influence on smartphone addiction at a statistically significant level. Their smartphone addiction was not affected by gender, grade of school, family economy, economic activities of parents and family rules at a statistically significant level. Regarding parental attitude, parental inconsistency and parental intrusiveness had a positive impact on smartphone addiction at a statistically significant level, but parental supervision, parental overexpectation, parental affection and parental rational explanation didn't affect smartphone addiction at a statistically significant level.
The findings of the study ascertained that the personal factors and parental attitude exercised a partial influence on youth smartphone addiction, and suggest that necessary measures should be taken such as the development of counseling and educational programs to raise awareness of the risks of addictive smartphone use, to improve the self-directed time management of teens for smartphone use and to change negative parental attitude. Finally, this study has some limitations. Only cross-sectional data that were obtained by making a quantitative research were analyzed, and nonprobability sampling was used. Parental attitude perceived by the teens was investigated without reflecting actual parental attitude, and 91 percent of the respondents belonged to the general user group that scarcely found themselves to be addicted to smartphones. Therefore follow-up research efforts should be made as to the findings of the study, and it's first required to set up a close smartphone addiction diagnosis system before that.