Exploratory Research on Smartphone Addiction Tendency of University Students: Differences between 1st and 4th Graders and between Those Who Started Using Smartphones Earlier and Later

Differences on smartphone addiction tendency of university students between 1st and 4th graders, and between those who had started using smartphones by middle school days （started-earlier users） and who started after high school days （started-later users） were examined. 243 participants answered a self-report questionnaire including Young20 plus 9 items for smartphone use and items for consciousness of dependence and using time. The factor analysis on the scores of items for addiction tendency brought 5 types of addiction tendency score: 4 composed of the sum score for the items scores corresponding to each abstracted factor （“uncontrolled using”, “necessity of life”, “absorption to smartphone world”, “using while other action”） and the total of the four. The ANOVAs revealed that the 4th graders were more depended than the 1st graders and the stared-earlier users were so than the stared-later users, especially on “necessity of life” and “using while other action”, and that the 4th graders were more conscious on their own dependency than the 1st graders. The results of multiple regression analyses for causal reasoning showed that the different factors had strong influence to the consciousness of dependence of the different groups. Particularly, the results indicated that the stared-later users formed their own consciousness judging from “uncontrolled using” and “using time” based on “necessity of life” and “using while other action”, while the stared-earlier user’s consciousness was influenced directly from the latter two factors. An assumption about the difference on the psychological condition of the two groups was induced from these results.スマホ依存傾向大学生依存自覚自己報告された使用時間smartphone addiction tendencyuniversity studentsconsciousness of dependenceself-reported using tim