One study showed that the teenagers spend on average 6 hours a day on smartphones. For students, spending 25% of the day on their cell phones has effects negative both on school and on their health. In fact, there is a risk of real addiction. Here’s what was discovered.
I study
Teens spend an average of 6 hours a day on their smartphones. Of these, around 4 are on social media. To say it is one study Finnish published in the scientific journal ‘Archives of Disease in Childhood‘.
There researchconducted in 2022 on a sample of 1,164 female students (average age 16 years) from high schools Helsinki, Espoo And Vantaawanted to investigate the relationship between the time spent on mobile phones and any addiction to social media, which they are usually associated with scholastic performance lower and problems on the Health It is on psychological well-being of adolescents.
As stated in the study, the researchers decided to carry out their investigation only on female students because both states of anxiety and the use of social media are more common among girls.
To all young who participated in the study were asked to quantify their daily smartphone use by sending screenshots of the pages of their mobile phones containing data on the use of the device and data relating to the time spent on individual apps.
To measure the possible addiction to the use of smartphones and social media, the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (Bsmas). On this scale the scores range from 6 to 30: the higher the score, the greater the possibility of having developed a dependence. Furthermore, the researchers used other validated scales to measure the students’ anxiety states and their judgment of their own bodies. The adolescents who participated in the study, for their part, individually assessed their health status,humorthe tiredness and the loneliness.
The results
Data on average daily smartphone use based on at least 3 days of use were available for 656 adolescents (56.4%), while 7 days of data were present for 298 (25.6%). The average daily smartphone use by adolescent girls was 350 minutes, or 5.8 hours, while the average time spent using social media was 231 minutes (3.9 hours). It is important to note that no significant differences were found between weekdays and holidays. This means that the girls who participated in the study used their smartphones in the same way both on the days they went to school and on those they did not go.
Detailed data on the most used applications was available for 564 adolescents (48.5%). In total, 205 adolescents (36.3% of those with available data) used social media for less than 3 hours per day, while 77 (13.6%) used social media for 6 hours or more.
Data on frequency of smartphone use was available for only 74 participants (13.1%). These ranged from 58 to 356 times per day (average 145). For 115 adolescents (20.4%) the most frequently used applications included games, with an average of 24 minutes per day.
Anxiety and lower grades
Based on the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, 183 adolescents (16.6%) presented with possible social media addiction. And more than a third (371, 37.2%) scored above the cutoff for a potential anxiety disorder.
Daily time spent on social media was associated with a low school grade point average, higher dependency scores, higher levels of anxiety and a worse body image that girls have of themselves. Social media addiction scores were then linked to anxiety, negative body image, poorer health, bad mood, tiredness and feelings of loneliness.
