Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use

By Sally Andrews, D. Ellis, Heather Shaw, L. Piwek. PLoS ONE, 2015

366 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Psychologists typically rely on self-report data when quantifying mobile phone usage, despite little evidence of its validity. In this paper we explore the accuracy of using self-reported estimates when compared with actual smartphone use. We also include source code to process and visualise these data. We compared 23 participants’ actual smartphone use over a two-week period with self-reported estimates and the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale. Our results indicate that estimated time spent using a smartphone may be an adequate measure of use, unless a greater resolution of data are required. Estimates concerning the number of times an individual used their phone across a typical day did not correlate with actual smartphone use. Neither estimated duration nor number of uses correlated with the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale. We conclude that estimated smartphone use should be interpreted with caution in psychological research.

Subfields: Communication, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b559f2f7bd10f8d22d2a7c2cb3c563c1a9fcee51

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Citations in the corpus

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017, background): “Smartphone owners interact with their phones an average of 85 times a day, including immediately upon waking up, just before going to sleep, and even in the middle of the night (Perlow 2012; Andrews et al. 2015; dscout 2016).”
A systematic review and meta-analysis of discrepancies between logged and self-reported digital media use (2021, background): “Notwithstanding the potential biases affecting log data 5,35,39,40 , if these measures are taken to be a valid reflection of actual usage 5,21,32,41,84 , our findings raise important concerns about the validity of findings and conclusions across many areas of the social sciences in which…”
Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning (2017, background): “Indeed, the limited evidence we have regarding the compatibility between subjective and objective usage measures indicates that self-report estimates of usage are likely to be of limited reliability, and only modestly correlated (if at all) with actual usage (Andrews et al., 2015).”