Fighting over smartphones?

Author(s)
Jörg Matthes, Marina Frederike Thomas, Anja Stevic, Desiree Schmuck
Abstract

Parental regulation of children's smartphone use is typically associated with conflict. To explain conflict, this paper focused on parents' own smartphone use. A panel survey among parent-child pairs (NTme2 = 384) revealed that parents' excessive smartphone use at Time 1 was associated with a lack of control over children's smartphone use at Time 2. Lack of control over children's smartphone use, in turn, was related to conflict about the smartphone from children's and parents' perspectives over time. The relations with conflict were independent of whether parents thought that smartphones have negative effects on children. Overall, findings stress that both, children's and parents' smartphone use, need to be considered when explaining technology-related family conflicts.

Organisation(s)
Department of Communication
External organisation(s)
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Journal
Computers in Human Behavior
Volume
116
No. of pages
8
ISSN
0747-5632
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106618
Publication date
11-2020
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
508007 Communication science, 508014 Journalism
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Psychology(all), Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Human-Computer Interaction
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/fighting-over-smartphones(51899152-754a-4fe2-a6b9-30fd1117f9ec).html