A brief measure of problematic smartphone use among high school students: Psychometric assessment using item response theory

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to use item response theory to assess a brief measure of problematic smartphone use among high school students, using the 2017-18 California Student Tobacco Survey (CSTS) collected from 119,981 students who own a smartphone across 256 high schools in California. An exploratory factor analysis supported two factors that represented problematic smartphone use and concurrent behavioral issues, explaining 47% of the variance. Item response modeling demonstrated good item discrimination for problematic smartphone use (a > 1.15) and valuable test information for respondents within two standard deviations of the sample mean. Students who reported a score of 3 (somewhat agree) or 4 (agree) on each problematic smartphone use item accounted for 22% (n ​= ​25,997) of the student population who owned smartphones in our sample. Concurrent and criterion validity were found as problematic smartphone use significantly predicted smartphone use instead of sleep (b ​= ​0.35, 95% CI [0.34, 0.36], p ​< ​.05), smartphone use instead of work (b ​= ​0.31, 95% CI [0.30, 0.32], p ​< ​.05), depressive symptomatology (OR ​= ​1.34, 95% CI [1.31, 1.37]), and loneliness (b ​= ​0.18, 95% CI [0.16, 0.18], p ​< ​.01). Implications for screening and identifying appropriate cut-off criteria for problematic smartphone use are discussed.

Keywords

• Problematic smartphone use
• Youth
• Measurement
• Psychometric
• Item response theory