NCT04303637

The Impact of Phone Use on Everyday Outcomes

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 1,000 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Yale-NUS College · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 13 Years – 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

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.

Detailed 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.

Conditions

• Obesity
• Sleep
• Depression
• Anxiety

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Phone use	Objective and subjective reports of smartphone use (e.g., number of hours, number of pick-ups, how phones are used)

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-03-25
• Primary completion: 2021-05-31
• Completion: 2021-06-10
• First posted: 2020-03-11
• Last updated: 2020-03-11

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Singapore