Ajou University’s Professor Chang Jae-yeon recently published a study to scholarly journal Public Health Reports regarding the classic subject of smartphone addiction. Most people care about what’s in their pockets at least a little; if that weren’t the case, people wouldn’t pay so much for them and, of course, websites like this one would probably not exist. There are those, however, who take it to the point of addiction, where it begins to affect their everyday life and interactions. Whether it’s the social media maven who just can’t get enough likes or the mobile gaming mafioso who keeps asking for just one more level, smartphone addicts are out there and, according to the study published by Professor Chang Jae-yeon, more of them are women than men, at least in South Korea.
The study, pulled from a survey back in 2013 that consisted of 1,236 students across six South Korean colleges, found that 52% of the women surveyed were on their smartphones for at least four hours a day, enough to kill the battery on some handsets, while only 29.4% of the men surveyed said the same of their use patterns. Upping the ante to six or more hours a day, which would require either a stellar battery or a midday top-up, found about 23% of women and 11% of men from the survey admitting to such heavy usage. The study also asked about using your phone while talking to others or otherwise engaged, to which 37% of women admitted their guilt. Men tended to use smartphones during their downtime. 20.1% of women surveyed noted insecure feelings when they couldn’t use their smartphone, versus only 8.9% of men in the survey.
Overall, the survey found that, when it comes to smartphones, the tendency toward dependent behavior was about 10% higher in women than in men, at least among the surveyed crowd. This flips classical figures on addiction on their heads, making it somewhat curious that men are found to be more addicted to sometimes diversions such as gambling or sitting down to a long round of a video game, whereas women are more prone to addiction toward a device that’s meant to be carried everywhere and do everything. The study also found that most women use their smartphones excessively for social media, while the addicted men tend to balance their usage out more. This plays nicely into societal stereotypes that peg women as being more social than men. It should be noted, however, that this was the first study to ever find smartphone addiction higher in women than in men, so this could very well be an anomaly that can be chalked up to the subset of people surveyed, rather than a universal trend.