Measuring Mobile Phone Use: Self-Report Versus Log Data

By Jeffrey Boase, Rich Ling. J. Comput. Mediat. Commun., 2013

420 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Approximately 40% of mobile phone use studies published in scholarly communication journals base their findings on self-report data about how frequently respondents use their mobile phones. Using a subset of a larger representative sample we examine the validity of this type of self-report data by comparing it to server log data. The self-report data correlate only moderately with the server log data, indicating low criterion validity. The categorical self-report measure asking respondents to estimate “how often” they use their mobile phones fared better than the continuous self-report measure asking them to estimate their mobile phone activity “yesterday.” A multivariate exploratory analysis further suggests that it may be difficult to identify under- and overreporting using demographic variables alone.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Management Science and Operations Research, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/686ae126f488a024ab06fcef487625145c8595c3

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Citations in the corpus

The relationship between Instagram use and indicators of mental health: A systematic review (2021, background): “Indeed, previous studies illustrate that self-reported estimates of intensity of SNS use significantly differ from objective indicators of smartphone or SNS use (e.g., Boase & Ling, 2013; Junco, 2013).”
Measuring Engagement in eHealth and mHealth Behavior Change Interventions: Viewpoint of Methodologies (2018, background): “Perski’s items and the purpose-built item used by other researchers usually have reasonable face-validity (eg, “how many times per week did you use the app?”) but might lead to over- or underreporting depending on how items are phrased [48,49].”
Using Smartphones to Collect Behavioral Data in Psychological Science: Opportunities, Practical Considerations, and Challenges (2016, neutral): “Social-interaction behaviors include initiated and received communications (via call and text logs; Boase & Ling, 2013; Chittaranjan, Blom, & Gatica-Perez, 2011; Kobayashi & Boase, 2012), ambient conversation (via microphone; Lane et al., 2011; Rabbi, Ali, Choudhury, & Berke, 2011), speaking rates…”
The Accuracy of Self-Reported Internet Use—A Validation Study Using Client Log Data (2016, methodology): “These findings are consistent with previous studies on self-reports of television news exposure (Prior, 2009b) or mobile phone use (Abeele et al., 2013; Boase & Ling, 2013).”
Digital Stress over the Life Span: The Effects of Communication Load and Internet Multitasking on Perceived Stress and Psychological Health Impairments in a German Probability Sample (2017, methodology): “Self-report data of CMC (e.g., sent and received text messages) typically show only moderate correlations with server log data (e.g., Boase & Ling, 2013).”
Associations between child mobile use and digital parenting style in Hungarian families (2019, background): “…that when people are asked about how often they use their mobile phone, the correlations are quite high between self-report and objective log-data (Boase, & Ling, 2013), parents might have distorted their responses regarding their mobile use and mobile attachment, especially given that these…”
Cell-Phone Addiction: A Review (2016, background): “One such study showed that the total perceived usage time reported on the questionnaires was higher than the actual registered data (3, 23, 114, 115), meaning that the self-perception of the time dedicated to the content reported in the questionnaires was less than the actual time registered by the ”
The Relationship Between Cell Phone Use and Academic Performance in a Sample of U.S. College Students (2015, methodology): “…the self-report measure used in this study was carefully developed to assure content validity and a subsequent test provided evidence of criterion validity, research by Boase and Ling (2013) illustrates that continuous, open-ended self-report cell phone measures are at risk of over reporting use.”
A systematic review and meta-analysis of discrepancies between logged and self-reported digital media use (2021, background): “1), 47 records were included in the final sample, with 45 either published or available as pre-prints 5,21,31,32,36–39, 41, 43–”