Is smartphone addiction different from Internet addiction? comparison of addiction-risk factors among adolescents

ABSTRACT

We investigated the similarities and differences among four addiction groups in Korean adolescents: Non-Addiction (NONE), Smartphone Addiction (SA), Internet Addiction (IA), and Internet-Smartphone Addiction (BOTH). For the dependent variables, we examined 12 addiction-risk factors related to psychology, family, and school environment that can influence the adolescents’ normative developmental path. To collect data, we conducted an addiction-risk factor comparison survey with 768 Korean adolescents in their first year of junior high school. Depending on the addiction groups, a multivariate analysis of variance or Tukey HSD post-hoc test was used to analyze statistical differences among the 12 addiction-risk factors. Our analysis yielded two key findings on how Internet addiction and smartphone addiction differ in terms of addiction-risk factors: (a) there were more similarities between the SA and NONE groups than between the IA and NONE groups, and (b) there were more similarities between the IA and BOTH groups than between the SA and BOTH groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• Internet addiction
• smartphone addiction
• addiction-risk factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea: [Grant Number 2015M3C7A1065859].