Abstract
Abstract
Objectives: The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of restricting mobile phone use with time on the anxiety levels of undergraduate students having moderate nomophobia. The study also aimed to find whether cognitive and sensory distractions within the environment could delay anxious thoughts and subsequent rise in anxiety levels.
Method: Current research was based on a quasi-experimental design with non-equivalent control group, i.e., the participants were not randomly assigned to groups. The participants were 64 undergraduate students taken from a university located in Islamabad. The State trait anxiety inventory (STAI) and Nomophobia questionnaire (NMPQ) were used. The study was carried out between August to December 2017.The data collected was analysed using general linear model to see the significant effect of time and treatment on the state anxiety levels at different time intervals.
Result: The findings from multivariate analysis revealed that the state anxiety increased significantly with time in participants having moderate nomophobia and who were not in contact with their mobile phones as hypothesized. However, cognitive and sensory distractions could only slightly delay the anxiety in fearful situations.
Conclusion: There is a significant effect of time and nomophobia on anxiety level of students who are separated from their mobile phone within the usual cognitive and sensory distractions in academic setting.
Keywords: Nomophobia, Mobile Phone Separation, Anxiety.
(JPMA 70: 1492; 2020)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5455/JPMA.31286
Introduction
Nomophobia has been observed as a growing fear and problematic consequence of mobile phone use in young adults. It is a term used to describe by combining phobia and no mobile phone use where the individuals might experience anxiety, discomfort, nervousness and anguish out of fear of not being in contact with their technology.1 Other characteristics that individuals might show include spending most time using mobile phone (on average 34 times a day), always keeping it switched on, sleeping in bed with it, looking at the screen to check calls and messages, feeling anxious at the thought of losing or misplacing phone, or apprehensive when it is not charged, or has no signal coverage.2
In addition to emergence of discomforted behaviours in students due to strenous mobile phone use, psychopathological consequences of using mobile phones have surfaced in literature findings. Spitzer3 advocated against the use of smartphones in educational settings by reporting its side effects from various countries. These include addiction, obesity, dissatisfaction, anxiety, depression, attention and empathy deficit disorders, aggression, personality disorders and loneliness. Moreover, the academic learning and behaviour along with student wellbeing has been negatively affected by the stress and distraction caused by excessive mobile phone use.4-8
Anxiety, an emotion described as feeling tensed and worrisome followed by changes in physiology such as increased heart rate or blood pressure and is widely researched with nomophobia. It is claimed that high dependency to mobile phones leads to temporary situational anxiety when the individual is no longer in contact with the mobile phone.1,9 Concomitantly, the association of anxiety with mobile phone use and presence of nomophobia was found to be significantly positively correlated in young adults enrolled in universities.10-12
It was noted that there have been very few experimental studies conducted to study the changes such as behavioural, physiological and emotional responses in individuals who are separated from their mobile phones.13,14 A recent meta analytic review focusing on the relationship between mobile phone use and anxiety revealed the scarcity of experimental studies to establish causality and implied the need for studying variables that might mediate the relationship.15
In particular, there have been none to study the participants with moderate to severe nomophobic tendencies. Moreover, past studies engaged the participants in a novel cognitive task within the experimental setting. In contrast, the current research intended to study the research participants within their natural setting to have a high level of ecological validity.
The study aimed to determine the mediating effect of having nomophobia in an individual and the subsequent anxiety levels when participants were separated from their mobile phones. Since there are very few empirical and experimental findings on the growing trend of nomophobia,16 thus, it is significant to explore causality and possible effect of nomophobia on anxiety levels. Mostly, the studies focused primarily on the mobile phone addiction and the related withdrawal symptoms whereas anxiety needs to be studied not as a withdrawal symptom of mobile phone addiction but because of situational fear or stress elicited by a specific situation such as nomophobia.
Furthermore, with respect to local scenario, there is a lack of indigenous findings from Pakistani population that could help to understand nomophobia and the possible causality between mobile phone separation and anxiety among young adults. The previous experimental designs focused on removing distraction from the environment where participants were seated,13 however, this study aimed to provide its participants the usual cognitive and sensory distractions found in academic settings to explore the impact on anxiety levels with extended time. In one of the previous study designs, it was proposed that extending the time duration might better help to investigate the impact of distractions on the possible cause of situational fear on anxiety.17
Therefore, the variables under study are nomophobia, time and mobile phone separation anxiety. Their relationship is hypothesised as follows:
H1: There is a significant effect of nomophobia on anxiety level of students separated from their mobile phone within the usual cognitive and sensory distractions in academic setting.
H2: There is a significant effect of time on anxiety level of students separated from their mobile phone within the usual cognitive and sensory distractions in academic setting.
Objectives
The study has following research objectives:
1. To determine the effect of nomophobia on anxiety level of students separated from their mobile phone within the usual cognitive and sensory distractions in academic setting.
2. To explore the effect of time on anxiety level of students separated from their mobile phone within the usual cognitive and sensory distractions in academic setting.
Method
The research design for the study was quasi experimental non-equivalent control group design, i.e., the participants were not randomly assigned to groups. Inclusion of control group added strength to the design by providing a reference comparison cluster. The dependant variable was measured for each interval consisting of a pre-test followed by three post-test time intervals of 1 hour, 1.5 hour and another 1.5 hour, making up 4-hour duration.
The participants (N = 64) divided equally in two groups (n=32), were undergraduate students recruited via purposive sampling (based on time and event) at a university in Islamabad. In literature, there exist several methods for determining the sample size. Experimental work on nomophobia in undergraduate students, published in recent past,14,18,19 has provided the guideline for sample size estimation for this study. Their age ranged from 17 years to 22 years with mean age of (19.3± 1.06 years). The female students comprised 58(90.6%) of the sample whereas male students made up 6(9.4%). Demographic characteristics and univariate statistics of study variables are presented in Table-1.
The Nomophobia questionnaire16 was used to measure the severity of nomophobia among participants. It consists of 20 statements that are responded through a 7-point Likert scale with a range from strongly agree marked as 7 to strongly disagree valued 1. The items are scored and summed to determine the level of having nomophobia. The score obtained equal to 20 indicate absence of nomophobia. The scores obtained from 21 ≤ to < 60 on the questionnaire indicate having mild nomophobia. However, cut off scores from 60 ≤ to < 100 determine having moderate nomophobia whereas the scores 100 ≤ to < 140 indicate having severe nomophobia. In the current study the internal consistency of the tool was strong with Cronbach alpha value at 0.92. Previous studies also reported it as a sound tool with good psychometric properties.16
The state portion of state trait anxiety inventory- short form was used which measures the presence and severity of symptoms of anxiety.20 It consists of 10 statements that are responded through a 4-point Likert scale such as not at all = 1, somewhat = 2, moderately so = 3 and very much so = 4. The statements 1, 3, 8 and 10 were reverse scored. The internal consistency of the scale was good with Cronbach’s alpha value at 0.87 within this study. The reliability coefficient and construct validity of the scale have been claimed to be reasonably good.20
A demographic data sheet was also provided to the participants consisting of variables such as age, gender, opinion poll about the use of mobile phone during class, and the number of hours spent on using mobile phone for various reasons.
The study took place in the regular lecture rooms which had identical furniture, seating pattern, wall clocks, windows, white board, room temperature and lighting. The only difference was the teachers who taught the courses and the type of class-fellows. There were no quizzes or tests during the 4-hour duration in either of the classes. The participants were asked to volunteer and take part in two studies as part of deception. One was informed as a survey study that focused on studying correlation of anxiety with other demographic variables while the other was a survey on mobile phone use. The participants filled the questionnaire on nomophobia once at pre-test interval along with demographics form. They filled the state anxiety forms at subsequent post-test intervals. The participants in condition group were asked to hand over their mobile phones for 4 hours. Throughout the study duration, participants carried on with their daily activities within the class.
The study protocols were approved by ethical review committee of the host institution (ref # CIIT-ISB/HUM/ERC-CPA/2018-8). The participants were clearly informed of their rights as part of the ethical considerations of the study. Informed consent was taken from all the research participants. They were assured of the confidentiality of their data and also briefed about their right to withdraw at any point during the study. After the study, the participants were debriefed about the true nature of the study and the reason to use deception. It was made sure that the study has no physical or psychological harm for the participants.
The general linear model was used to test the hypothesis with time and treatment as the independent variables and state anxiety as dependant variables within the subjects and between the groups. The analysis of covariance was used to analyse the changes in mean state anxiety scores with time. Significant main effects were also examined to study the trends of anxiety scores.
Results
The study tested the significance of mediating effect of nomophobia (hypothesis 1) and time (hypothesis 2) on the anxiety levels of students who were separated from their mobile phone. Both these hypotheses were supported by the data of the study. The result of multivariate analysis showed that the effect of nomophobia and treatment (mobile phone separation) was significant on anxiety scores at Roy’s largest Root= 7.32, F (5, 8) =11.71b, p = 0.00. The effect of time on anxiety levels was also significant such as Wilks’ Lambda = 0.86, F (3, 57) =3.04a, p= .04 (Table-2).
It was also proposed that state anxiety will be affected with time in users who are separated from their mobile phones in distracting environment. It was predicted that despite cognitive and sensory distraction, the attention to threat would still be given and the state anxiety would be subsequently affected with time. This was supported by the data because of the significant impact of participant’s moderate nomophobia tendency, treatment and time on the state anxiety scores (Table-2) that led to increase in state anxiety scores.
Moreover, as presented in Table-1, the trends of state anxiety scores showed that there has been a greater increase in anxiety of participants who were separated from their mobile phones with M = 22.6 (SD = 6.65) as compared to participants who were not separated, with M = 18.2 (SD = 6.71). Therefore, trends from the findings further revealed that anxiety increases with time in participants who are separated from their mobile phones even in distracting environments (Figure).
Mauchly’s test indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been violated W = .61, X2 (5) = 28.13, p
