Typical Phone Use Habits: Intense Use Does Not Predict Negative Well-Being
This addresses the problem of understanding smartphone impact on well-being for general users, showing it's more nuanced than just usage intensity, though it is incremental in refining existing research.
The study identified five distinct phone use profiles from 340 participants' activity data over four weeks, finding that intense use alone does not predict negative well-being, but nightly use sessions are linked to lower well-being.
Not all smartphone owners use their device in the same way. In this work, we uncover broad, latent patterns of mobile phone use behavior. We conducted a study where, via a dedicated logging app, we collected daily mobile phone activity data from a sample of 340 participants for a period of four weeks. Through an unsupervised learning approach and a methodologically rigorous analysis, we reveal five generic phone use profiles which describe at least 10% of the participants each: limited use, business use, power use, and personality- & externally induced problematic use. We provide evidence that intense mobile phone use alone does not predict negative well-being. Instead, our approach automatically revealed two groups with tendencies for lower well-being, which are characterized by nightly phone use sessions.