New paper: ”Deconstructing screen time: The connections between digital use, dissatisfaction, and disconnection“
DISTRACT researchers Malene Hornstrup Jespersen, Kristoffer Albris and Helene Willadsen have just published the paper ”Deconstructing screen time: The connections between digital use, dissatisfaction, and disconnection“ in Computers in Human Behavior Reports.
In the paper, they aim to investigate the interrelations of different digital use cases and provide insights from which relevant conceptualizations of ‘screen time’ can be made. Adapting theories and measures of dissatisfaction with digital use and digital disconnection from previous studies, they divide screen time into thirty-four variables, and use this division to ask how different devices, platforms, and activities are related to people’s wishes to decrease their digital use and their propensity to disconnect. They draw their findings from a representative survey covering 9,524 individuals. Using OLS regressions, they find that dissatisfaction with passive and solitary entertainment predict both wanting to decrease digital use overall and the propensity to digitally disconnect. Further, they find that the wish to decrease smartphone use is the most impactful predictor of wanting to decrease digital use overall. It is, however, not a significant predictor of the propensity to disconnect. This gap between intentions and actions suggests that the physical presence of the smartphone negatively impacts individuals’ experienced balance in their digital use.
Read the full paper here.