Adolescents Spend 1.5 Hours Daily on Smartphones During School

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

In January, New York Governor Kathy Hochul released a report, titled “More Learning, Less Scrolling,” to prohibit smartphone use during the school day. A team of public health and pediatric researchers, led by Lauren Hale, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, are working to understand not just screen time use by adolescents but the duration and content of that use, particularly during a typical school day (8:00 AM to 2:30 PM). In a new study that monitored smartphone data, they found that adolescents (aged 13 to 18) spent an average of 1.5 hours each school day on their smartphones.

Their findings are highlighted in a JAMA Pediatrics research letter titled “Adolescent Smartphone Use During School Hours.”

Hale led the Stony Brook University team that developed the IRB-approved study protocol. The team then hired a survey research firm, Ipsos, to recruit a national sample of participants and complete the survey.

As part of the protocol, nearly 300 participants completed a 15-minute smartphone-based survey and installed RealityMeter to measure smartphone use. Hale and colleagues analyzed the data from the survey and constrained the sample to those who collated smartphone data for two or more school days a week, creating a total sample of 117 eligible adolescents.

In this sample, adolescents’ average smartphone use was 1.5 hours during the school day. Moreover, over 25% of the sampled adolescents spent more than two hours on their smartphones during school.

Excluding Internet browsing, adolescents’ five most used apps were text messaging, Instagram, video streaming, audio, and email.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-adolescents-hours-daily-smartphones-school.html