Sex, age, and smartphone addiction across 41 countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most studies of problematic smartphone use focus on younger participants in a single country, which makes global comparisons difficult. Here, we administered the Smartphone Addiction Scale (Short Version) to 50,423 participants aged 18 to 90 from 195 countries and subdivisions. The results showed that women scored 3.22 units higher than men, each year of age predicted a decrease of 0.18 units, and global scores increased by 0.66 units per year. Among the 41 countries with at least 100 participants, almost all showed a consistent pattern: women scored higher than men (B = −0.19 to 6.07) and there was a downward slope with age (B = −0.38 to −0.03), though the shape of the slope varied across countries. The highest problematic smartphone use scores were around Southeast Asia and the lowest were in Europe. This global sample, currently the largest in the field, helps clarify the relationships between sex, age, and smartphone 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".