Youth Perspectives on the Recommended Age of Mobile Phone Adoption: Survey Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite increasing prevalence of phone ownership in early adolescence, there is a deficit of evidence-based guidance on the appropriate time to provide youth their first phone. OBJECTIVE: This survey study explored age recommendations for phone ownership among a diverse panel of youths, as their experiences are an important contribution to the development of ownership guidelines. METHODS: Participants were recruited from MyVoice, a national panel of over 765 youth (14 to 24 years old) who respond to weekly SMS text message-based surveys. Questions were distributed between January 24 2018, and March 20, 2018. Inductive qualitative analysis was used to identify major themes among youths' open-ended responses. RESULTS: In all, 469 youth (mean age 18.8 years; female: 299/469, 63.8%; White race: 332/468, 70.8%) responded. On average, respondents obtained their first phone at 12.2 years of age. Most participants (325/459, 71.1%) stated they received their first phone out of necessity rather than for entertainment or social reasons. Youth recommended that early adolescents receive their first phone between 12 and 13 years of age primarily for reasons of necessity (146/448, 32.6%). CONCLUSIONS: According to the participants, phones supported safety and independence by allowing communication with parents and participation in activities. Youth-serving professionals and parents can incorporate these youth perspectives into shared decision-making about phone ownership among families. This can include discussions about essential features, safety, or phone use, as well as maturity and responsibility milestones, which were all key considerations reported by participants in the survey.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".