Smartphone Dependence of University Students and Parental Rearing Attitudes

Materials And Methods

For the study, approved by the Ethics Committee of the Wakayama Medical University, we recruited 195 medical-university students. After informed consent was obtained, the students filled out a set of self-rating questionnaires designed to evaluate smartphone dependence and perceived parenting. Of 177 respondents who both possessed smartphones and had properly completed all the questionnaire items, statistical analysis was performed for 150 respondents (96 males, 54 females) who reported using smartphones mainly to access the Internet. In a previous study, we found that respondents using smartphones mainly to access the Internet had statistically significantly higher scores, both in total and for each WSDS subscale, than respondents who mainly used other devices to access the Internet (Toda, Nishio, & Takeshita, 2015a). Mean (±SD) age for males was 20.5±2.2 years and for females 19.5±1.0 years.