A smartphone user scrolls through videos on Facebook.
Photo by Marvin Wurr.
Smartphones have become an intrinsic part of everyday life in the United States, and even more, in college students.
According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans own a cell phone, a marked increase from a mere 35% in the Center’s first survey regarding cell phone ownership in 2011.
Of the people surveyed, 97% of adults aged 18-29 said they owned a smartphone, a figure that includes the vast majority of college students in the United States.
The proliferation of smartphones among college students has not gone unnoticed. Several professors at the university have instituted restrictions on smartphone usage in their classrooms, with many outlining these restrictions on their syllabi, citing concerns regarding the potential of smartphones becoming a distraction during classroom hours.
Many of these professors’ concerns are not unfounded. A 2014 study by Roberts, Yaya and Manolis for the Journal of Behavioral Addictions notes that “[a]n addiction to one’s cell-phone can undermine academic performance as students use their cell-phones to ‘remove’ themselves from classroom activities, cheat, and to disrupt their studies.”
The study surveyed a pool of 164 students at a major Texas university, with researchers posing several questions regarding the respondents’ screen time on their phones. The results showed that the students spent at least nine hours daily on their phones, with much of that time split between texting, e-mails, and social media.
Researchers lay out a number of limitations with regards to generalizing their study, namely that their sample size was composed of students from the school’s marketing department. However, their findings regarding daily screen time does not diverge significantly from the self-reported screen times of students at the university.
“I think it’s between six and eight hours,” said Mitch Garcia, a first-year transfer student from Columbus State, referring to their daily screen time.
“I spend like six hours,” said Xavier Peterson, a first-year vocal performance major.
Alongside academic performance, excessive smartphone screen time may negatively influence students’ mental health. A 2021 study by Rosenthal and colleagues reports “a significant relationship between mobile screen time, whether self-reported or objectively measured, and depressive symptoms among college students.”
The study notes that individuals who spend more time on their phones may be neglecting in-person social interaction, which is often a vital component for maintaining a healthy state of mind. Furthermore, they also theorize that the correlation between screen time and depressive symptoms could be a positive feedback loop; individuals who find themselves increasingly more depressed by what they see on their phones may increase their screen time as a form of escapism from reality.
Rosenthal and colleagues note that college students often use their smartphones “as aids for e-learning and web-based education,” with many viewing their phones as vital tools for bettering their education.
Combatting the effects of smartphone addiction will require students to adopt a more disciplined approach to how they use their devices, which may include techniques such as keeping social media apps away from their homepages or prioritizing apps that focus on productivity.
This is especially vital for college undergraduates, as Rosenthal and colleagues note that “college students are in a transitional period between adolescence and early adulthood, which is a critical and vulnerable developmental stage in which mental health outcomes and risk behaviors can be initiated and influence the rest of the life course.”
