Archive | 2021
A brief measure of problematic smartphone use among high school students: Psychometric assessment using item response theory
Abstract
Abstract The purpose of this study was to use item response theory to assess a brief measure of problematic smartphone use among high school students, using the 2017-18 California Student Tobacco Survey (CSTS) collected from 119,981 students who own a smartphone across 256 high schools in California. An exploratory factor analysis supported two factors that represented problematic smartphone use and concurrent behavioral issues, explaining 47% of the variance. Item response modeling demonstrated good item discrimination for problematic smartphone use (a > 1.15) and valuable test information for respondents within two standard deviations of the sample mean. Students who reported a score of 3 (somewhat agree) or 4 (agree) on each problematic smartphone use item accounted for 22% (n\xa0\u200b=\xa0\u200b25,997) of the student population who owned smartphones in our sample. Concurrent and criterion validity were found as problematic smartphone use significantly predicted smartphone use instead of sleep (b\xa0\u200b=\xa0\u200b0.35, 95% CI [0.34, 0.36], p\xa0\u200b