The relationship between smartphone use and smartphone addiction: An examination of logged and self-reported behavior in a pre-registered, two-wave sample

There has been a growing literature that has utilized logged behavior from smartphones to study the impacts of technology use on individuals. One of these proposed impacts has been that people become addicted to their smartphones. Measurements of smartphone addiction do not appear to strongly correlate with actual behavior logged from smartphones. Instead, smartphone addiction may be better explained by distress rather than disordered behavior, but this has not been adequately tested. This study examined the relative contributions of self-reported and actual smartphone behavior alongside key mental health and individual differences in a pre-registered, two-wave study with a two-week re-test. 511 smartphone users (391 at Time 2) completed measures of smartphone usage, attitudes towards smartphone usage, smartphone addiction, other behavioral addictions, and individual differences. The results suggest smartphone addiction is principally driven by perceived rather than actual usage, especially where these are discordant. Self-reported smartphone usage, other behavioral addictions, and the impulsivity facet of negative urgency are more predictive of smartphone addiction than logged behavior. These results suggest that volume of smartphone usage is insufficient in of itself to explain problematic smartphone behavior and questions the criterion validity of smartphone addiction measurements.