Developing and Testing a Smartphone Dependency Scale Assessing Addiction Risk

Literature Review

Existing scales already measure technology acceptance, and we build from these extant scales. Our unique contributions are therefore not the creation of original scales, but 1) to develop a more comprehensive survey that simultaneously measures both non-smartphone and smartphone-related constructs. 2) to test its use in the previously mentioned emerging market context, the Philippines.

We show in Table 1 below a broad review of research on smartphone and similar technology use (Internet, chat-texting, FaceBook, gaming). It shows our base constructs and the context where they were performed. Rather than creating new items, we built our scales from previous literature, and now combine them into a single survey to be tested in the Philippines. (The actual process of scale development will be described in the following methods section.) Except for two research studies which were conducted in Southeast Asia, most of the literature on smartphone usage occurred in first world countries such as the US, UK, South Korea and others. While some articles employed more two constructs, not all combined constructs as we did in our own scale.