Development and Validation of the Smartphone Addiction Scale for Children- Parent Version (SASC-P)

Abstract

Introduction: The use of smartphone among children and adolescents has been increasing steadily over the past decade and is becoming a cause of concern for parents and healthcare professionals alike. Excessive use of smartphone could make a child vulnerable to develop addictive behaviour leading to decrease in academic performance and impairments in social and personal environment. Early identification is key to addressing this issue and although there are scales to measure smartphone addiction in adults, there are no scales to measure smartphone use in children objectively. Aim: To construct a smartphone addiction scale for children that can be administered to parents. Materials and Methods: A set of statements were created to assess smartphone addiction in children. Initially, 43 statements were selected after identifying its content validity and face validity and the scale was administered to parents of children in the age group of 3-17 years after obtaining informed consent from the parents. The construct validity was examined by the exploratory factor analysis. The screen plot of ordered eigen values of a correlation matrix was used to decide the appropriate number of factors extracted. A factor loading of >0.30 was used to determine the items for each factor. Intra-class correlations were calculated for the test-retest reliability, and Cronbach's alpha was calculated for the internal consistency. The final questionnaire contained 24 statements across six subdomains of smartphone addiction and it was administered to a small sample group of 65 parents of children aged 3-17 years and the data was used to test for reliability and validity of the scale. Results: Alpha correlation for the Smartphone Addiction Scale for Children-Parent (SASC-P) ranged from 0.670 to 0.823. The intrinsic validity for the domains was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha and it ranged from 0.819 to 0.907 for the domains and was 0.972 for the whole questionnaire. Thus the scale was found to be reliable and valid for use in children and adolescents. Conclusion: The SASC-P has good reliability and validity and can be used to measure smartphone use in children and adolescent.

Keywords

• environment
• measure
• questionnaire
• reliability