One of the major aims of this research was to identify the underlying structure of smart
phone addiction symptoms among university students in mainland China. Specifically, our
data yield five clearly identifiable factors: disregard of harmful consequences, preoccupation,
inability to control craving, productivity loss, and feeling anxious and lost. Principal
components factor analysis results appeared to present construct validity of the Smart Phone
Addiction Scale (SPAS) and accounted for 70.09 percent of the variance. Moreover, not only
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is the 19-item SPAS able to provide a wealth of contextual information relating to smart
phone addiction, but the data also yielded clear evidence for the multi-factorial nature of
smart phone addiction symptoms – five distinct factors representing an series of Chinese
university students’ behavioral consequences from smart phone addiction. As a whole, SPAS
(both the index SPAI and the five-symptom subscales) correlated mostly with measures of
psychologically meaningful constructs such as shyness and loneliness and smart phone usage.
These constructs contain a wide series of theoretically and practically important factors for
influencing smart phone addiction in general.
Moreover, SPAS differentiate from mobile phone addiction scale (MPAS) (Leung, 2007)
for two different addiction symptoms – disregard of harmful consequences and preoccupation.
This may be because that Leung’s research was focus on adolescent, while this study was
focus on university students. Since university students have more free time and less control
from parents than adolescent, they may lead to cause the addiction symptoms which caused
more by spending more time on smart phone especially disregard of harmful consequences
and preoccupation. Moreover, past research found preoccupation and disregard of harmful
consequences as internet addiction symptoms (Tao et al., 2010; Leung, 2004). Smart phone
with operation system and computing platform, provides user a similar experience of
computer. Furthermore, smart phone let user to connect to the internet anywhere anytime.
Thus it has more chance to have smart phone addiction symptoms as preoccupation and
disregard of harmful consequences than standard mobile phone.