Sleeping with the smartphone
- Author(s)
- Kathrin Karsay, Desiree Schmuck, Anja Stevic, Jörg Matthes
- Abstract
This article seeks to explain the longitudinal associations of taking the smartphone to bed on adolescents’ daytime tiredness and physical well-being. We examined whether parents’: (a) active mediation; and (b) restrictive mediation determines whether children and adolescents have their phones within reach in bed or not. We used longitudinal data from a two-wave panel survey (NTime2 = 384) of early adolescents (10–14 years, MTime2 = 12.37, SD = 1.48, 46.4% girls) and one of their parents (=parent–child dyads) in Germany. A polling company collected the data in a four-month interval in 2018 and 2019, using a quota-sample procedure based on parents’ age and gender. Structural equation modelling revealed that active but not restrictive parental mediation at Time 1 (baseline) negatively predicted adolescents having their smartphones in bed at Time 2 (follow-up). We found that having a smartphone in bed increased adolescents’ daytime tiredness. Daytime tiredness was associated with decreased physical well-being over time. The findings indicate that parents should use active mediation to reduce their children’s use of their smartphones at nighttime to protect their physical well-being from tiredness.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Communication
- External organisation(s)
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
- Journal
- Behaviour & Information Technology
- Volume
- 42
- Pages
- 1833-1844
- No. of pages
- 12
- ISSN
- 0144-929X
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2100277
- Publication date
- 2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508007 Communication science
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Sciences(all), Developmental and Educational Psychology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Human-Computer Interaction
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/sleeping-with-the-smartphone(5b784099-234a-4780-89c5-ef934000ad37).html