Because of its extremely large population base, Mainland China has the most mobile phone users worldwide. In January 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China announced that over 1.3 billion Chinese people (95.5%) have their own mobile phones [
1]. As smartphones emerged in recent years, China also became the largest consumer market of smartphones, advancing at an astonishing pace. According to the International Data Corporation, in 2014 alone, more than 420 million smartphones were sold in Mainland China [
2].
Smartphones no longer need to be considered simply as “mobile phones.” With various enhanced functions, a smartphone is not just a communication tool, but a real-time information provider and a powerful portable computer. Although the smartphone brings conveniences to people’s daily lives, it is also associated in certain cases with patterns of addictive usage involving negative outcomes. According to Billieux and colleagues [
3,
4], problematic smartphone use (PSU) is defined as “an inability to regulate one’s use of the smartphone, which eventually involves negative consequences in daily life.” Several studies have introduced the term “smartphone addiction” on the basis of similarities in symptoms displayed by excessive smartphone users and substance abusers (e.g., loss of control, cognitive salience, mood regulation) [
5,
6]. Nevertheless, to date, the evidence that problematic (smart)phone use constitutes a genuine addiction is scarce, especially regarding issues such as tolerance and withdrawal [
4]. To reduce the risk of pathologization [
7], we decided to use the term
problematic smartphone use (PSU) to describe the condition. Existing studies reported that problematic mobile phone use was associated with various worrisome physical and psychological issues [
8‐
13], which suggests that excessive usage may also bring about adverse effects in the realms of psychological well-being, interpersonal relationships, and physical health. Moreover, as smartphones are much more complex and enhanced than traditional mobile phones, Kim et al. [
14] argued that the adverse effects caused by PSU might be even more exacerbated than they are with mobile phones.
Compared with older social groups, undergraduates were shown to be more vulnerable to PSU [
15,
16]. As young people, undergraduates are highly interested in smartphones, yet the critical transition of their psychological and cerebral development is not yet completed. Moreover, today’s undergraduates are digital natives who have grown up surrounded by (smart)phones and integrated this instrument into part of their lifestyle and identity [
17]. Tao et al. [
18] assessed problematic mobile phone use with the Self-rating Questionnaire for Adolescent Problematic Mobile Phone Use in a large random sample of Chinese middle school students and high school students in 2012, and the prevalence of problematic mobile phone use among Chinese adolescents was estimated to be 26.2%. However, limited data are available in the literature about the prevalence of PSU by using a reliable sampling method with a sufficiently large sample of Chinese undergraduates.
The current landscape of smartphone use among Chinese undergraduates may be different from other countries and regions of the world. Indeed, it has been established that socio-environmental and cultural factors influence the nature and type of excessive and addictive behaviors displayed in a specific country or geographic area [
19‐
21]. As a developing country with a huge population, China has its cultural particularity and special practices. Moreover, because the proliferation of smartphones and the development of the Internet in China have been incredibly fast, this macro-level transition may have an impact on undergraduate students as well. Although PSU might be a serious problem for Chinese undergraduates, few studies to date have explored this topic in Mainland China.
Socio-demographics
Previous studies emphasized associations between specific socio-demographic variables and PSU. Among these studies, several identified a gender effect, with females reporting more intensive use and symptoms of addictive use than males [
22‐
25]. Regarding age, some studies reported that younger individuals are more likely to show elevated use and symptoms of dependence on the mobile phone than are older individuals [
15,
16]. Moreover, socioeconomic status [
26,
27] was also related to addictive mobile phone use, although the results were inconsistent. Some studies suggested that lower socioeconomic status is related to problematic mobile phone use [
26,
27], whereas other studies pointed to the opposite conclusion [
27‐
29]. One study also found that students majoring in humanities were more likely to use mobile phones more problematically than were those majoring in natural science [
30]. Given these previous findings and taking into account the Chinese context of college education, we expected that females, junior undergraduates, and those majoring in humanities or with immoderate monthly income from the family would be more at risk for PSU.
Psychological factors
Influential models have proposed that excessive and addictive behaviors (e.g., substance abuse, deregulated sexual and eating behaviors, problematic gambling, and problematic video gaming) are displayed to reduce or alleviate aversive states through temporary cognitive and/or behavioral escape [
19,
31,
32]. Therefore, addictive-like behaviors could be considered as consequences of distraction, and avoidance-based strategies could be used to manage chronic stressors and aversive emotions. Such a hypothesis is also indirectly supported by the many studies that have linked problematic (smart)phone use with personality traits that act as risk factors for addictions, including neuroticism [
33,
34] and impulsivity [
3,
15,
23,
35‐
37]. Accordingly, several potential risk factors emerged from a stress-coping approach to PSU, such as psychopathological symptoms (anxiety, depression) and perceived stress.
Experience of aversive emotions and negative mood states are core predictive candidates for PSU according to the stress-coping theory. Previous research consistently reported associations between psychopathological symptoms such as anxiety and depression and various addictive and excessive behaviors, including alcohol abuse [
38], smoking [
39], and Internet-related disorders [
40,
41]. Several studies also highlighted that depression and anxiety symptoms were similarly associated with problematic mobile phone use [
5,
42‐
44], leading scholars to hypothesize that smartphone use can serve to relieve negative effect in depression- or anxiety-prone individuals and thus produce addictive patterns of use [
42,
45]. In the present study, we expected that both depression and anxiety would be positively associated with PSU.
Elevated perceived stress occurs when individuals are faced with a situation appraised as demanding and/or threatening while insufficient resources are available to cope with this situation [
46]. Several recent studies reported that subjective stress was positively associated with addictive smartphone use [
6,
47]. Consistent with the stress-coping framework described earlier, Chiu [
6] proposed that smartphone might be used as a distraction from stressful experiences and thus act as coping mechanism. From the existing studies, we expected that perceived stress would be positively associated with PSU.
An eventual potential risk factor for PSU, which has to our knowledge not yet been investigated, is perfectionism, defined as a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations [
48]. We considered this personality factor to be relevant to our theoretical rationale, as numerous studies have linked it to elevated perceived stress [
49‐
51], obsessive-compulsive behaviors [
52], and excessive behaviors frequently conceptualized as addictive behaviors, such as workaholism [
53] or physical exercise dependence [
54]. In the multidimensional model provided by Foster et al. [
55], perfectionism traits can be viewed as either adaptive (i.e., Personal Standards and Organization) or maladaptive (Concern over Mistakes, Parental Expectations, and Doubts about Actions). In this model, Personal Standards and Organization reflect some of the positive characteristics of perfectionism, especially with respect to planning and completion of tasks, while the other three traits reflect the negative characteristics of perfectionism. In the present study, we expected that Personal Standards and Organization would be protective factors against PSU, as these functional aspects of perfectionism have been positively linked to psychological well-being and life satisfaction [
56]. In contrast, we expected that Concern over Mistakes, Parental Expectations, and Doubts about Actions would be risk factors associated with more PSU because an elevated level of parental expectations has been associated with increased perceived stress for students with an Asian cultural background [
57], potentially resulting in PSU as a coping process, and Concern over mistakes and Doubts about Actions could promote PSU as a consequence of compulsive checking tendencies [
58].