Exploring the relationship between college students’ adaptability and nomophobia

ABSTRACT

Several studies have been conducted to investigate the factors associated with nomophobia from the perspective of the internal personality characteristics of college students. However, few studies have explored how interactions between an individual and their external environment, such as adaptability, could influence nomophobia. Therefore, based on the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution theory, this study employed the Freshmen Adaptability Scale and the Nomophobia Scale to investigate the relationship between adaptability and nomophobia. A total of 670 college students participated in this study. Results indicated that students’ learning adaptability (β = .177, p < .01), interpersonal adaptability (β = .306), and economic adaptability (β = .492, p < .001) were positively associated with emotional adaptability, and emotional adaptability was negatively associated with nomophobia concerning problematic mobile phone use (β = −.272, p < .01). Emotional adaptability played a full mediating role in these associations. Furthermore, homesickness adaptability was not only positively associated with emotional adaptability (β = .191, p < .001), but also negatively associated with nomophobia (β = −.149, p < .01). Emotional adaptability played a partial mediating role in this association. These findings expand our understanding of nomophobia and draw attention to the roles of emotional adaptability and other adaptabilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptability
• problematic mobile phone usage
• nomophobia
• structural equation model
• bifactor model

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to all participants in this study.

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Tour Liu, Shixiu Ren, Danhui Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Shixiu Ren, all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (Tianjin Normal University, China) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5) (Ethical review number: XL2020-08).

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 62007003].