The Impact of Phone Use on Everyday Outcomes

• Conditions: Obesity; Sleep; Depression; Anxiety
• Interventions: Behavioral: Phone use

• Registration Number: NCT04303637
• Lead Sponsor: Yale-NUS College

Brief Summary

Participants will download a phone-tracking app for a week to track phone usage, providing objective data on usage patterns. Quantitative tasks and questionnaires will also be carried out before and after the tracking period.

Detailed Description

A notable shortcoming of existing mobile phone research is that 'phone use' has almost exclusively been measured through subjective reports - by simply asking respondents how much time they spend on their mobile phones each day. This operational definition, however, is a major shortcoming as phone use is difficult to track - and is thus likely to be highly inaccurate.

To address this gap, the investigators describe in this proposal a first step to characterize phone usage in an objective manner - by asking adolescents to download a phone-tracking app for a week. This circumvents measurement errors inherent to self-reports, and allows us to probe: (1) how accurate adolescents' estimates are of their own phone usage, and (2) whether objective phone usage predicts any cognitive, socio-emotional, or physical outcomes. The completion of this study will represent an important step forward in the development of empirically-driven guidelines on phone use amongst adolescents.

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2019-03-25
• Status Verified: 2020-03
• Study First Submitted: 2020-03-08
• Study First Submitted QC: 2020-03-10
• Last Update Submitted: 2020-03-10
• Study First Posted: 2020-03-11
• Last Update Posted: 2020-03-11
• Primary Completion: 2021-05-31
• Study Completion: 2021-06-10

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: UNKNOWN
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 1000

Inclusion Criteria

• Owns a smartphone

Exclusion Criteria

• Parents not willing to give consent
• History of medical or psychiatric disorder
• History of motion sickness, dizziness or epilepsy

Study & Design

• Study Type: OBSERVATIONAL
• Study Design: Not specified

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
High school student	Phone use	13-18 year old students enrolled in schools within Singapore.

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS 21)	11 minutes (single measurement)	A 21-item, 4-point scale measuring participant emotional states. This is the short form of the longer 42-item DASS.
Body mass index	1 minute (single measurement)	Participants' body mass index
Sleep duration	2 minute (single measurement)	Assessment of participants' sleep time \& wake time

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Digit Span Task	10 minutes (single measurement)	A digit span task carried out using a computer program
Psychomotor Vigilance Task	10 minutes (single measurement)	PVT carried out using a computer program
Pediatric Daytime Sleepiness Scale (PDSS)	5 minutes (single measurement)	A 8-item, 5-point self-report scale to measure sleepiness during the day.
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)	10 minutes (single measurement)	A questionnaire looking at a student's emotional and behavioural aspects in relation to coping with school.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Yale-NUS College; 🇸🇬 Singapore, Singapore