Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Addictive Behaviors
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/addictbeh

Understanding the construction of ‘behavior’ in smartphone addiction: A

scoping review
Richard J.E. James *, Grace Dixon, Maria-Gabriela Dragomir, Edie Thirlwell, Lucy Hitcham
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham. University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom

A B S T R A C T

It has been claimed that smartphone usage constitutes a behavioral addiction, characterised by compulsive, excessive use of one’s phone and psychological with­
drawal or distress when the phone is absent. However, there is uncertainty about key phenomenological and conceptual details of smartphone addiction. One of the
central problems has been understanding the processes that link smartphone usage, and addiction. The question this paper aims to answer is straightforward: based
on measures utilised in the literature, what does ‘behavior’ mean in the context of smartphone addiction? A scoping review of the smartphone addiction literature
was undertaken. This identified 1305 studies collecting smartphone addiction data. Just under half (49.89%) of all published smartphone addiction papers did not
report the collection of any smartphone specific behaviors. Those that did tended to focus on a small cluster of self-reported behaviors capturing volume of overall
use: hours spent using a smartphone per day, number of pickups, duration of smartphone ownership, and types of app used. Approximately 10% of papers used
logged behavioral data on phones. Although the theoretical literature places increasing focus on context and patterns of use, measurements of behavior tend to focus
on broad, volumetric measures. The number of studies reporting behavior has decreased over time, suggesting smartphone addiction is becoming increasingly trait-
like. Both major phone operating systems have proprietary apps that collected behavioral data by default, and research in the field should take advantage of these
capabilities when measuring smartphone usage.

1. Introduction which it is understood that specific behaviors become learned, habitu­

The advent of the smartphone has brought significant benefits to
society. However, there are many that claim that smartphones might be
damaging as well, including the possibility that people might become so
dependent on their devices that this amounts to a behavioral addiction
(Kwon et al., 2013b; Montag, Wegmann, Sariyska, Demetrovics, &
Brand, 2021). There has been intense debate about the phenomenology
of smartphone addiction, particularly between the smartphone itself,
and the content displayed on smartphones. While some researchers have
argued for a model in which people are addicted or dependent upon
their smartphones, this has not stood up to critical scrutiny (Panova &
Carbonell, 2018; Yu & Sussman, 2020). Increasingly, researchers have
argued instead that the type, patterns and context of use are critical, and
thus distinguish smartphone addiction from other addictive disorders (i.
e. specific behavioral addictions, internet addiction) (Elhai, Yang, &
Levine, 2021b; Griffiths, 2021; Montag et al., 2021; Starcevic et al.,
2021; Wu, Lin, & Lin, 2021). However, whether the empirical literature
is measuring such behaviors is an open question. The purpose of this
paper is to report the findings of a scoping review on how behavior is
measured in smartphone addiction research. There is a need to move
from a symptom-based account of addiction to a process-based model in
ated, and ultimately compulsive (Perales et al., 2020). Understanding
how behavior is measured is a crucial step towards achieving this aim,
and help discriminate whether smartphone addiction is a genuine dis­
order, or an example of overpathologizing everyday behaviour (Billieux,
Schimmenti, Khazaal, Maurage, & Heeren, 2015b).
Smartphone addiction has been proposed as a potential disorder,
defined by excessive, compulsive, uncontrolled use of one’s phone
leading to a psychological dependence upon the device (or the content
on it) (Kwon et al., 2013b). Further, the removal of, or the inability to
use the phone may lead to withdrawal states or intense feelings of
distress. There is a specific literature looking at the latter phenomenon
under the term ‘nomophobia’ (Yildirim & Correia, 2015). It is increas­
ingly acknowledged that problematic phone use is heterogeneous, with
different aetiologies characterised by excessive reassurance, impul­
sivity, and extraversion (Billieux, 2012; Billieux, Maurage, Lopez-
Fernandez, Kuss, & Griffiths, 2015a; Canale et al., 2021). These
involve distinct motivations, types of engagement, and outcomes.
Nomophobia, although conceptualised in terms of a phobia, has features
that could be associated with an excessive attachment pathway. It has
been debated whether nomophobia is distinct from dependence (King
et al., 2013; León-Mejía, Gutiérrez-Ortega, Serrano-Pintado, &

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: lpzrj@nottingham.ac.uk (R.J.E. James).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2022.107503
Received 29 June 2022; Received in revised form 28 August 2022; Accepted 20 September 2022
Available online 26 September 2022
0306-4603/© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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R.J.E. James et al.
González-Cabrera, 2021), whereas others have treated it as synonymous
(Lee, Kim, Mendoza, & McDonough, 2018b). At present, neither
smartphone addiction, nor other related terms are classified as disorders
in any diagnostic manual, despite proposals to do so (Bragazzi & Del
Puente, 2014). Smartphone addiction has been associated with multiple
negative outcomes, including increased psychological distress (Demirci,
Akgönül, & Akpinar, 2015), musculoskeletal injury (Alsalameh, Harisi,
Alduayji, Almutham, & Mahmood, 2019), dangerous driving and work
behaviors (Kita & Luria, 2018), and fraying relationships with family
members and close friends (Hawi & Samaha, 2017). Nonetheless,
although addiction symptoms have been identified, there is limited ev­
idence these are sufficiently well defined, severe, or impair function
enough to be considered clinically relevant (Panova & Carbonell, 2018).
Understanding the behaviors being measured is of clear importance.
The most prominent models of addiction take a behavioral neuroscience
perspective (Berridge & Robinson, 2016; Hogarth, Balleine, Corbit, &
Killcross, 2013) grounded in learning, reinforcement and conditioning,
and so an analysis of the behaviors reinforcing smartphone addiction is
long overdue. The mechanisms underpinning many behavioral addic­
tions are poorly understood (James & Tunney, 2017), but are crucial to
prominent models of these candidate disorders (Brand et al., 2019). The
mechanisms behind smartphone addiction are particularly unclear.
Smartphones are highly reinforcing and salient in general (Chen, Zhang,
Gong, & Lee, 2019; Moretta, Chen, & Potenza, 2020; O’Donnell &
Epstein, 2019). Phone usage is comprised of frequent, intermittent pe­
riods of use (Oulasvirta, Rattenbury, Ma, & Raita, 2012), with app usage
proceeding in sequential fashion, one app triggering the next in a
cascade of behavior. Due to this type of habitual reinforcement, the
frequency of pickups might capture impaired control (Ellis, Davidson,
Shaw, & Geyer, 2019). This problem is further complicated as smart­
phones enable engagement with potentially addictive behaviors such as
gambling (James, O’Malley, & Tunney, 2017; James, O’Malley, &
Tunney, 2019), gaming (Liu, Lin, Pan, & Lin, 2016), shopping (Lopez-
Fernandez et al., 2017), and social media (Chen et al., 2020). Addi­
tionally, changes to adapt content to smartphones may alter schedules of
reinforcement or create contexts of use that might make them more
addictive or harmful. For instance, the proliferation of mobile gambling
has come with a focus on in-play betting, which has different rein­
forcement schedules to other forms of betting (Whiteford, Hoon, James,
Tunney, & Dymond, 2022).
Our operationalisation of behavior in this study focuses on the ac­
tions that people specifically do on their smartphones. This encompasses
overall behavior (e.g. time spent on phone, pickups), and specific types
of use (e.g. on social media). These can potentially indicate whether
smartphone use is excessive, whether certain types of content are
salient, or if there is evidence of tolerance over time. As operationali­
sations of some addiction criteria (i.e. tolerance) have significant
weaknesses (Billieux et al., 2015b; Lin et al., 2015), developing behav­
ioral markers may be desirable. Additionally, we incorporate instru­
mental behaviors that give insight into phone usage (e.g. expenditure),
phone use in contexts that might be seen as dangerous (e.g. driving) or
inappropriate (e.g. during clinical practice), and self-reported addiction.
Contextual factors such phone use after waking up may be related to
dependence measures in other addictive behaviors (Heatherton,
Kozlowski, Frecker, & Fagerstrom, 1991). Others may involve functional
impairment, or harmful behavior in the workplace. Identifying the level
of analysis that is currently being undertaken by the existing literature
informs consensus best practice in the field, but also provides horizon-
scanning for identifying markers that will progress theory and practice.
As important as identifying which behaviors are being measured is
how they are being measured. Therefore, we also make a distinction
between studies that measure behavior using self-report, and studies
that log data from participants’ phones. There are increasing opportu­
nities to track people engaging in addictive behaviors. This is most
notable in the gambling literature, where logged data has been
increasingly used (Auer & Griffiths, 2022; Auer, Malischnig, & Griffiths,
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Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503
2020; Deng, Lesch, & Clark, 2019), and this has begun in gaming
(Johannes, Vuorre, & Przybylski, 2022), while there has been long­
standing interest in the use of biomarkers to assess nicotine use (Beno­
witz, 1996; Shahab et al., 2017). Nonetheless, self-report is principally
used to measure engagement with addictive behavior. These opportu­
nities are particularly salient in smartphones, which have considerable
sensing capacity. There has been a growing literature that has used
logged data, occasionally at the event level (Andrews, Ellis, Shaw, &
Piwek, 2015; Noë et al., 2019), but principally summary data (e.g. daily)
(Elhai et al., 2021a; Marengo et al., 2021; Ryding & Kuss, 2020). The
growing literature using logged data has highlighted notable differences
in the relationship between usage measured using these different
methods, and smartphone addiction (Parry et al., 2021). Associations
between logged phone use and smartphone addiction are typically
weaker than self-reported usage. It is worth noting that logged data can
potentially capture behaviors that are (and are not) currently elicited
using self-report. In light of growing concerns about the use of self-
report, and the validity of technological addiction scales (Davidson,
Shaw, & Ellis, 2022), identifying instances where immediate translation
is possible has benefits for improving practice across the field.
The aims of this scoping review are fourfold: (1) to categorise what
kinds of behavior are measured in the smartphone addiction literature,
(2) identify how frequently behavior is measured, (3) how behavior is
measured (self-report vs logged), and (4) whether these have changed
over time.
2. Methods
2.1. Searches
This study is part of a larger project looking at the relationship be­
tween smartphone behaviors and smartphone addiction. The review was
registered on PROSPERO at https://www.crd.york.ac.
uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=301792. A systematic
search of the literature was undertaken using two sources (Web of
Knowledge and Scopus). Candidate papers were identified, downloaded,
and then searched for relevance, principally determined by the presence
of a smartphone addiction scale but also consideration of smartphone
addiction (e.g. for qualitative studies).
The following terms were entered into the databases:
smartphone addiction, smartphone dependence, problematic
smartphone use, excessive smartphone use, smartphone use disorder,
nomophobia.
Initial searching was conducted in February 2022 with follow ups
until 29th May 2022.
Papers were included in the scoping review based on the following
criteria:
- Was the paper focused on smartphone addiction? (i.e. did it include
an addiction measure, and if not was the paper substantially focused
on the topic e.g. for qualitative studies).
- Did the paper report the use of primary data? i.e. not a literature
review, theoretical paper, systematic review or meta-analysis, and
not reporting data previously reported in the literature (e.g. reuse of
data, secondary analysis of an existing data set). Secondary data
were removed because reporting of data will be limited to key var­
iables of interest and overlap. For longitudinal or intervention
studies that were included, measurements were taken at baseline or
the first wave that smartphone addiction was included as a variable.
- Was the paper written in English, and accessible to the research
team?
R.J.E. James et al.
2.2. Data extraction
The following features were extracted:
- Bibliographic information: Title, authors, abstract, journal of publi­
cation, publication year, DOI
- Number of citations
- Type of study
- Type of data: questionnaire, qualitative, mixed methods, observa­
tional, intervention
- Countries of study
- Type of sample recruited
- Number of participants sampled
- Demographic information: Mean age, standard deviation of age, and
gender distribution of sample
- Smartphone addiction measurement employed, range, % identified
as exceeding addiction cutoff, mean and standard deviation
- Smartphone behaviors measured, and descriptive statistics
- Category of smartphone behavior
- Self-report or logged behavior
2.3. Data synthesis
Smartphone behaviors were categorised by the researchers into
groupings based on the type of behavior being measured. For instance,
studies using measures such as number of hours spent per weekday, per
weekend day, and per week were all categorised into ‘screen time’.
Similarly, the amount of time spent on certain kinds of app, the use of
certain kinds of app, and the frequency at which certain kinds of app
were used were categorised into ‘type of use’. Context of use behaviors
were determined on the basis of measures asking when people used their
phones (i.e. time of day, immediately before sleep, after waking), the use
of phones in places and situations that are inappropriate or dangerous (i.
Fig. 1. Flow chart of data extraction procedure.
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Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503
e. while driving, during clinical practice, whilst talking to someone).
2.4. Data availability
The data and analysis code are available on the Open Science
Framework at https://osf.io/f9huw/.
2.5. Statistical analysis
Descriptive examination of the literature was initially conducted i.e.
number of studies, weighted demographic means, number of studies
measuring behavior and types of behavior. Logistic and quasi-Poisson
regression models were estimated to examine whether there were
changes in the number of studies measuring behavior (0 = behavior, 1 =
no behavior), and the number of behaviors measured, and whether the
measurement was logged or self-report (self-report = 0, logged = 1) as a
function of publication year.
3. Results
3.1. Descriptive statistics of studies
A total of 5434 were examined for relevance, and 1305 studies were
identified as meeting the inclusion criteria (Fig. 1), comprising a total of
1,164,262 participants (M = 906.85, Median = 405, SD = 3781.29)
(Fig. 2). The weighted mean age was 20.83 (Fig. 3) (unweighted M =
21.59, SD = 6.75), the weighted average standard deviation was 3.75,
and the weighted percentage of women sampled was 55.68 %. The
number of smartphone addiction papers has increased rapidly over the
last decade, from 2012 (2) to 2021 (350) (Fig. 4). The most common
countries where studies were conducted were China (2 6 2), South Korea
(156), and Turkey (155); studies from these three countries make up
nearly 40 % of the published literature (Table 1). Approximately 3 in 4
R.J.E. James et al. Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503

Fig. 2. Histogram of sample sizes utilised in smartphone addiction research (censored at 3500).

Fig. 3. Distribution of average ages of participants taking part in smartphone addiction research.

(74.68 %) studies principally or exclusively sample from school and
university students (Table 2).
3.2. Smartphone use behaviors
Half of the smartphone addiction studies (652 of 1305 (49.89 %))
studies reported no collection of behavioral measures (Table 3). The
behaviors were subsequently aggregated into eight categories. Four of
these (screen time, type of use, preferred type of use and pickups)
directly capture types of smartphone behavior. The remaining four are
either indirect measures of exposure (i.e. expenditure, length of
ownership), or contextual variables that tap into harmful use (context of
use, self reported addiction). Of the studies that measured behavior,
most had a measure of screen time, a type of use, and length of

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R.J.E. James et al. Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503

Fig. 4. Chart of the frequency in which papers identified in the scoping review were published by year (2022 is up to 29th May 2022).

Table 1 Table 2
Countries of study in smartphone addiction research. Types of sample utilised in smartphone addiction research.
Country of Study Frequency Country of Study Frequency Type of sample Frequency

China 262 France 5 Child/adolescent (non-school) 10

South Korea 156 Peru 4 Clinical (smartphone addiction) 5
Turkey 155 Mexico 4 Clinical (other non-SA disorder) 29
United States 84 Jordan 4 General Population (including specific age ranges, profession types) 257
India 67 Austria 4 Quasi-clinical (screened using SA measure) 24
Spain 48 Sweden 3 School 309
Italy 47 Philippines 3 Student (university or college) 747
Republic of China 34 Oman 3 Unclear 33
Saudi Arabia 32 Netherlands 3
Germany 30 Kuwait 3 Note: Total frequency exceeds number of studies as some utilised multiple
Iran 28 Hungary 3 sampling sources.
Malaysia 27 Ecuador 3
United Kingdom 26 United Arab Emirates 3
version (395) (Kwon, Kim, Cho, & Yang, 2013a; Kwon et al., 2013b), the
Indonesia 21 Morocco 3
Brazil 19 Vietnam 2
Nomophobia Questionnaire (Yildirim & Correia, 2015) (134), the
Pakistan 16 Ukraine 2 Smartphone Addiction Proneness Scale (Kim, Lee, Lee, Nam, & Chung,
Lebanon 12 Norway 2 2014) (101), and the Mobile Phone Addiction Inventory (Leung, 2008)
Canada 11 Northern Cyprus 2 (68). Approximately 15 % (14.93 %) of papers report some form of non-
Australia 11 Nepal 2
standardized, or bespoke scale to measure smartphone addiction.
Japan 9 Ghana 2
Switzerland 8 Colombia 2
Singapore 8 Belgium 2
3.4. Changes over time
Israel 7 Bahrain 2
Egypt 7 Sri Lanka 1
Bangladesh 7 Slovakia 1 A logistic regression was used to model changes in measurement over
Thailand 6 Russia 1 time (1 = no behavior measured). Across 1221 (93.56 % of sample) fully
Nigeria 6 Denmark 1
published papers, the number of studies reporting smartphone use
Estonia 6 Cameroon 1
Serbia 5 Brunei 1 behavior has significantly decreased over time (b = 0.103, se = 0.031, p
Romania 5 Bosnia and Herzegovina 1 <.001, OR = 1.108) (Fig. 5). If the papers currently in press are included,
Portugal 5 Unclear 15 this effect becomes stronger (b = 0.108, se = 0.028, p <.001, OR =
Poland 5 Multinational Sample 49 1.114). This effect is further confirmed when modelling number of be­
haviors using a quasi-Poisson regression (b = -0.0597, se = 0.0164, p
ownership, or a mixture of these three. <.001).

3.3. Smartphone addiction 3.5. Logged versus self-reported behavior

Many different measures have been utilised in the literature. The Just over 1 in 10 papers (10.38 %, n = 68) that reported any
most popular measures are the Smartphone Addiction Scale and its short smartphone behavior used logged data from people’s phones. There is

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R.J.E. James et al. Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503

Table 3 behavioral information regarding smartphone usage, and this propor­

Domains of smartphone use, example behaviors, and frequency of employment tion is increasing over time. The most common measures are overall
in the smartphone addiction literature. volume of phone use (i.e. screen time, type of use), elicited via self-
Domain Example Behaviors Frequency report. Despite increasing acknowledgement of the importance of pat­
Screen Time (preoccupation, Average daily smartphone use 418
terns or contexts of harmful use, the field has become increasingly
tolerance (over time)) (weekday and/or weekend), reliant on measuring trait smartphone use through addiction scales. On
average weekly smartphone use top of concerns about best measurement practice (Harris, Regan,
Type of Use (preoccupation) Kinds of app used, frequency of 331 Schueler, & Fields, 2020), criterion validity (Ellis et al., 2019; Parry
specific kinds of app use, time spent
et al., 2021), and construct vaidity (Davidson et al., 2022), they
on specific types of app use, number
of calls or texts made per day frequently measure an ambiguous or unitary addiction construct that is
Preferred Type of Use Main type of smartphone app used, 62 less empirically supported (Yu & Sussman, 2020). These findings suggest
(salience) most favoured types of app used, that the use of these instruments is becoming less critical as evidence
purpose of smartphone use challenging their validity mounts.
Context of Use (dependence, Phone use just before sleeping, 128
withdrawal, dangerous use, immediately after waking up,
There are some important methodological caveats to keep in mind.
conflict) phone use whilst driving, walking, There was a lack of consistency in measuring smartphone addiction,
during lectures, clinical practice, with the exception of the nomophobia literature, where the Nom­
‘phubbing’ other people, phone ophobia Questionnaire is well-established as the default instrument.
related accidents
Accompanying the plethora of different measures developed (Harris
Length of Ownership Number of years of smartphone 130
(dependence) ownership, number of smartphones et al., 2020), including at least 3 different ‘Smartphone Addiction
participant has ever owned, age Scales’, are degrees of freedom in their deployment. 15 % of papers used
first used a smartphone a non-standard adaptation of an existing scale, or a bespoke measure
Expenditure (tolerance) Number of phones owned, monthly 43
expenditure on smartphone bill,
amount spent on mobile data
Pickups (loss of control, Number of times phone used per 102 Table 4
withdrawal, compulsivity) day or week, number of smartphone Number of studies reporting logged versus self-report data over time.
sessions, frequency of phone checks
Year Logged studies Self-report studies % Logged
per day (either in number or per
hour) 2012 0 1 0
Self-reported addiction Does participant believe they are 39 2013 2 3 40
addicted to their smartphone 2014 3 6 33.33
No behavior 652 2015 4 14 22.22
2016 4 30 11.76
2017 5 40 11.11
indicative evidence again that the use of logged behavior has declined 2018 8 59 11.94
2019 9 84 9.68
over time (b = -0.130, se = 0.057, p =.022, OR = 0.878) (Table 4).
2020 6 124 4.62
2021 20 155 11.43
4. Discussion 2022 4 40 9.09
In press 3 31 8.82
Around half of smartphone addiction studies do not collect any Note: only studies reporting behavior included.

Fig. 5. Percentage of studies reporting smartphone usage behavior over time.

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R.J.E. James et al.
often derived from existing scales. For instance, a study might use the
Smartphone Addiction Scale (Kwon et al., 2013b) and utilise a 5 or 7
point Likert instead of the advised 6 point scale. These might substan­
tially affect how respondents interact with these instruments, but are
often implemented ad hoc. This highlights the need for consensus in the
use of smartphone addiction measurements. The lack of a gold standard
in the field frustrates this goal, but also highlights the need for further
validation work instead of developing new instruments, especially as the
most popular measures are weakly validated.
Similar degrees of freedom emerge with the behavioral measures.
While there is some consistency regarding the type of behaviors being
collected, the way they are measured is subject to variance that might
affect how behavior is elicited. Take self-reported measurements of daily
smartphone usage for instance: some studies use a free text entry,
whereas others use a range of ordinal categories. These categories differ
considerably in their coverage, with some having the lowest usage
category being 30 mins, or an hour, two hours, three hours or in one
study, five hours. Others ask for weekly estimates using different frames.
There has been no psychometric work on the influence of these and how
these might lead to anchoring effects that bias responding (Tversky &
Kahneman, 1974). There is evidence of bias in estimations of social
media use across different methodologies (Ernala, Burke, Leavitt, &
Ellison, 2020), demonstrating the need for such research. It would be
beneficial to run an experimental study looking at these effects. This is
also apparent with the choice of categories that are included for types of
app use, particularly when researchers are asking participants to select
their preferred type of smartphone functionality. These are similarly
heterogeneous, and risk distorting results. This is particularly conten­
tious, as often these are used to estimate associations with smartphone
addiction, claiming that some forms of app use are more harmful than
others.
There are also instances where the measures blur between measuring
behavior and other constructs. Studies and scales that ask about
smartphone attitudes, motivations or attachment often include ques­
tions that relate to behavior. Often these are then treated as part of the
same construct, putting together multiple forms of activity (Rosen,
Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, & Rokkum, 2013). In a number of studies,
general technological behavior (e.g. volume of total internet use) was
used in lieu of smartphone use specifically. These were excluded as these
do not specifically capture smartphone use, and so although they will
encompass smartphone usage, they also measure extraneous behavior
(e.g. PC). This reinforces that the boundaries between smartphone and
internet addiction are fuzzy in practice as well as in theory (Montag
et al., 2021). It also stresses the need for further evidence that smart­
phone and other ‘platform’ addictions (i.e. internet, social media) are
behaviorally and clinically distinguishable. There is some evidence they
are psychometrically separate (Baggio et al., 2018), but this is an area
where more granular data and additional analyses are needed.
Smartphone addiction studies are overly focused on a relatively
narrow subset of the population. The average age of a respondent in
these studies is approximately 20 years old. Three in four (74.68 %) of
these studies principally sample children and adolescents (e.g. from
schools), or university students. These have important implications for
the constructs being measured. First, this is generally a risk group for the
emergence of mental health difficulties across many kinds of disorder,
including addictive behaviors (Kessler et al., 2007). Individual differ­
ences associated with addictive behaviors, such as different facets of
impulsiveness, similarly peak around the same time (Romer, 2010).
These studies might therefore overestimate the relationship between
smartphone addiction, mental health and other individual differences.
Much of the justification for this approach comes from the high preva­
lence of smartphone ownership among younger adults. However, in
many countries this is changing, as uptake of smartphones among adults
exceeds 60 % (Ofcom, 2020), and smartphones are now the default. The
literature provides comparatively little information about smartphone
addiction across the lifespan. Smartphone addiction instruments
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Addictive Behaviors 137 (2023) 107503
identify large proportions of their samples (around 40 %) as being
‘addicted’. The sampling at present makes it difficult to determine
whether this is measuring genuine problematic usage, or whether this is
biased due to poor measurement practice, or oversampling groups more
vulnerable to distress and addictive behavior in general.
Having said that, the samples collected are internationally diverse,
collecting data from countries across the world that are often underu­
tilised in mainstream psychological research. The existence of this ca­
pacity does provide opportunities to improve the quality of smartphone
addiction research. Behavioral measures can, with few exceptions, be
readily extracted from smartphones. Proprietary apps such as Screen
Time and Digital Wellbeing already log most behaviors organically
measured in the literature. Measures of interest such as average daily
use, pickups, time spent specific apps are already collected by phones on
a daily and weekly basis, and engagement with these apps is prevalent
(Hitcham, Jackson, & James, 2022). Therefore, logged data already be
collected with minimal inconvenience (e.g. screenshot), and without the
need for app development for behavioral tracking (Hodes & Thomas,
2021). It is concerning that the proportion of papers reporting logged
behavior appears to be falling. Although there are situations where self-
report might be needed to understand the interplay between subjective
and objective measures of behavior, in most of the situations there is no
clear reason why actual behavior is not being measured. It is strongly
recommended that where possible, logged data should be used, as has
been advised elsewhere (Kaye, Orben, Ellis, Hunter, & Houghton, 2020).
Nonetheless, there is utility to intensive behavioral tracking, e.g.
logging phone events and inputs. Although there has been some interest
(Andrews et al., 2015; Lee, Ahn, Choi, & Choi, 2014; Lee, Han, & Pak,
2018a; Noë et al., 2019), the number of studies is small. There are two
benefits to doing so. The first is that the transition to a process-based
model of addictive smartphone use requires event level data, which
can be used to model learning parameters and levels of conditioning and
habit to different smartphone reinforcers. These can then be used to
operationalise clinically relevant markers cross-sectionally (loss of
control), or longitudinally (e.g. tolerance, relapse). Only the collection
of intensive behavioral data will be able to definitively discriminate
between smartphone-general and content-specific accounts of smart­
phone addiction. The second is the opportunity to use the sensing ca­
pacities of smartphones to monitor smartphone addiction. The sensing
capabilities of smartphones have been used to monitor, identify and
classify behavioral markers of conditions such as bipolar disorder
(Faurholt-Jepsen et al., 2020; Faurholt-Jepsen et al., 2014), depression
(Canzian & Musolesi, 2015; Jacobson & Chung, 2020), and Parkinson’s
disease (Raknim & Lan, 2016; Zhan et al., 2018). While this may be due
to the lack of consensus regarding the clinical relevance of smartphone
addiction and identifying valid criteria, there is clear scope for further
research complemented by the use of clinical samples.
There are some limitations to be aware of with this analysis. The
study of smartphone addiction and related concepts is an international
effort, taking place in countries such as China, Turkey, South Korea,
India and Saudi Arabia. This means there is likely to be systematic
missingness, as papers will be published in non-English language jour­
nals. Our definition of behavior is also contestable, as it has been
restricted to actions people specifically engage with on their phones and
its immediate context (i.e. phubbing, when the phone is used). Similarly,
the categorisations employed in this study are one way of representing
the different types of behavior in the literature, but alternatives exist.
For instance, the categorisation of ‘context of use’ covers multiple be­
haviors with different processes. There is additional scope for further
analysis with the data collected e.g. deriving norms of smartphone
usage, text-mining.
To conclude, this scoping review found that just under half of
smartphone addiction papers do not collect smartphone behavioral data,
and the proportion is falling over time. The most common measures
focus on length and type of smartphone use. We make the following
recommendations:
R.J.E. James et al.
- Behavioral data should be collected and should be logged by default.
Screen time apps should be used to collect data on screen time, type
of use, pickups, preferred type of use.
- Self-report data should be used only where necessary. Indicators
such as length of ownership, subjective markers of addiction (to
validate behavior) are examples, and research should validate elici­
tation of self-reports.
- Further research using intensive behavioral tracking research is
required to model learning and conditioning processes in smart­
phone use.
- Empirical research should capture heterogeneity in problematic use
(i.e. different pathways). This should be accompanied with greater
variation in research designs (i.e. longitudinal), and sampling (i.e.
adults, older people).
- There is an need for clinical research to determine the clinical rele­
vance of smartphone addiction criteria, and validate existing scales
and behavioral markers.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
The data is publicly available on the Open Science Framework at
https://osf.io/2bw4q/.
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