The Impact of Phone Use on Everyday Outcomes

Yale-NUS College

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Obesity; Depression; Anxiety; Sleep

Treatments: Behavioral: Phone use

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04303637

S-18-213

Details and patient eligibility

About

Participants will download a phone-tracking app for a week to track phone usage, providing objective data on usage patterns. Quantitative tasks and questionnaires will also be carried out before and after the tracking period.

Full description

A notable shortcoming of existing mobile phone research is that 'phone use' has almost exclusively been measured through subjective reports - by simply asking respondents how much time they spend on their mobile phones each day. This operational definition, however, is a major shortcoming as phone use is difficult to track - and is thus likely to be highly inaccurate.

To address this gap, the investigators describe in this proposal a first step to characterize phone usage in an objective manner - by asking adolescents to download a phone-tracking app for a week. This circumvents measurement errors inherent to self-reports, and allows us to probe: (1) how accurate adolescents' estimates are of their own phone usage, and (2) whether objective phone usage predicts any cognitive, socio-emotional, or physical outcomes. The completion of this study will represent an important step forward in the development of empirically-driven guidelines on phone use amongst adolescents.

Enrollment: 1,000 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 13 to 18 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Owns a smartphone

Exclusion criteria

• Parents not willing to give consent
• History of medical or psychiatric disorder
• History of motion sickness, dizziness or epilepsy

Trial design

1,000 participants in 1 patient group

High school student

Description:

13-18 year old students enrolled in schools within Singapore.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Phone use