Attachment to mobile phones : an examination of university students’ mobile phone use within an attachment theory framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the increasingly ubiquitous use of mobile phones in modern culture, particularly among university students, recent research has focused on the behaviours, characteristics, and effects of mobile phone use, with the evaluation of addictive features largely dominating work in this area. Given the lack of consensus regarding the etiology and standard measure of this addiction model, the objective of this study was to explore the possibility of an alternative framework for understanding university students’ relationships with their mobile phones (i.e., that of attachment theory rather than addiction). To this end, data was collected from 403 undergraduate participants (between the ages of 18-25, who owned a smartphone with at least one active social media account) recruited from two large Canadian universities. Participants responded to an online questionnaire including measures of sociodemographic information (e.g., gender, ethnicity, mobile phone use), adult attachment dimensions, mobile phone attachment, problematic mobile phone use, and their device’s perceived relationship-facilitating function. Findings indicated that, overall, participants were forming some degree of attachment to their mobile phones, and that this was particularly true for those higher in attachment anxiety. Further, attachment anxiety was found to be related to characteristics of problematic mobile phone use, and this relationship was mediated by features of mobile phone attachment. Thus, results from this study supported the use of an attachment theory framework for understanding what has typically been conceptualized as mobile phone addiction (i.e., there was an indirect relationship between attachment anxiety and problematic mobile phone use through participants’ attachments to their mobile phones). As the first study to examine the relationship between mobile phone attachment and problematic mobile phone use, findings from this work have important implications for understanding university students’ relationships with their mobile phones, while offering insight into some of the alarming behaviours that have emerged alongside increasing mobile phone use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".