Exploring the Factors of Smartphone Addiction: An Exploratory Factor Analysis

Abstract

Overuse of smartphones (smartphone addiction) has become a nuisance in student life. Therefore, this study had an objective to explore the factors of smartphone addiction among undergraduate (UG) students. The descriptive research method was adopted with a quantitative approach. 591 UG Students were selected randomly from different colleges of the University of Delhi. Under the descriptive statistics, the index of skewness and kurtosis and its standard errors were computed to test the normality of the data set. As an inferential statistic, “Exploratory Factor Analysis” (EFA) was applied to explore the factors of smartphone addiction. Further, “Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy”, (KMO) was applied to test Sampling Adequacy. In addition to it, “Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity’’, was applied to test intercorrelations among variables. Multicollinearity was verified by determinant. The varimax rotation method was applied to rotate the factor matrix under orthogonal rotation. The analysis of the data set provides evidence as a result that smartphone addiction has six factors namely ‘Time’, ‘Interference’, ‘Psychological Worry and Concern’, ‘Dependency’, ‘Craving’, and ‘Technology use and Privacy’ This study explains the total 35.397 per cent of the total variance. ‘Time’ as a factor had the highest explained variance i.e. 16.895 per cent among all six factors whereas the factor namely ‘Technology Use and Privacy’ explained 2.766 per cent of the total variance which was the lowest among all the factors.