Some Teen Girls Clocking Up Close to Six Smartphone Hours Per Day

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Some teenage girls are clocking up close to 6 hours a day on their smartphones, with a significant proportion of them likely addicted to social media, finds research published online in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Social media addiction was associated with poorer health and well-being, the findings indicate.

Recent research has linked increasing levels of anxiety among teen girls with social media use, note the researchers. This may involve several factors, one of which is addiction, with estimated international prevalence ranging from 5% to 31%, they add.

Because both anxiety and social media use are more common among girls, the researchers wanted to: measure objectively the time teen girls spend on their smartphones and especially social media; measure possible social media addiction using a validated scale; and estimate the associations between social media use and addiction with well-being.

They therefore contacted all 49 high schools in three large cities in Finland: Helsinki; Espoo; and Vantaa. In all, 21 geographically and socioeconomically diverse schools, attended by 1,164 female students aged 15–16, chose to participate.

These pupils represented 59% of female high school students in the participating high schools and just over 29% of all female high school students in the study area.

All the teenagers were asked to estimate their daily smartphone use. And of the 656 (56%) who supplied smartphone information, 564 (86%) had 3–7 days of screenshot data including an average of seven apps; the remainder (92) had just 1–2 days of screenshot data that didn’t include apps.

Total screen time was then divided by the number of days to arrive at average daily screen time. Similarly, total app use time was divided by the number of days with data available to find the average daily time spent on different activities.

The teenagers estimated that they spent 5.2 hours a day on their smartphones.

Detailed data on the most frequently used apps was available for 564 teens (48.5% of the total). In all, 205 (just over 36.3% of those with available data) spent less than 3 hours/day on social media while 77 (14%) spent 6 or more hours on it.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-05-teen-girls-clocking-smartphone-hoursday.html