A growing fear

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of nomophobia (the fear of being out of mobile phone contact) among young adults in Turkey. The Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q) was administered to 537 Turkish college students. The results revealed 42.6% of young adults had nomophobia, and their greatest fears were related to communication and information access. The study also found that gender and the duration of smartphone ownership had an effect on young adults’ nomophobic behaviors, whereas age and the duration of mobile phone ownership had no effect. Based on these results, implications, limitations, and further studies were discussed.

Nomophobia: An Individual’s Growing Fear of Being without a Smartphone—A Systematic Literature Review

“…The research analyzed is eminently exploratory, descriptive, nonexperimental, correlational, and cross-sectional, using the questionnaire as a single research collection instrument [1,2,4,13,16,[18][19][20]23,25,26,[29][30][31][32][33]35,37,39,58,[61][62][63][64], presenting a quantitative methodological design. Others, however, extend this information with mixed methodological design, including qualitative techniques, such as interviews or discussion groups [5,20,24,65].…”

“…Most research aims to analyze the prevalence of nomophobia in different groups, whether students, clinic patients, or random people [1,18,19,23,29,30,32,33,36,37]. At the same time, some of them ask if there is any correlation between presenting nomophobia and other alterations of a psychic [5,13,25,26,35,[58][59][60] or physical [61] nature, as well as alterations in learning and attention [31,54], in academic performance [2], coping styles [4], or other psychosocial problems arising in the digital and smartphone era [11,15].…”

“…Most research has nomophobia as the main and only study variable [1,4,7,14,[17][18][19][22][23][24]27,28,30,31,34,65]. However, other researchers have been interested in examining the relationship between nomophobia and physical factors, such as age [29,33,60], context [29], presence of Carpal tunnel syndrome or median nerve in the wrist [61], and gender [32,33,35,39,58]. Others have studied the relationship between nomophobia and psychic and psychological variables such as anxiety [20,33,37,39], panic disorder [5,20,59], stress [11], depression, avoidance or hostility [12,39], obsessiveness [12,25], FOMO (fear of missing out) [15], personality (extraversion, awareness, emotional stability and regulation, sympathy, and openness to experience) [12,13,16,26,33,35], mindfulness…”

“…The samples used in the various studies vary considerably, both in number, where there is a range from one person to 3216, and in the population on which it is focused. First, in relation to the size of the sample, there are studies that have used a sample between one and 150 people [19,21,27,33,59,61], between 151 and 400 people [11,13,18,[23][24][25]30,31,34,35,60,62,64], between 401 and 1000 people [1,2,4,12,[14][15][16]22,26,29,32,36,37,39,58,63,65], or more than 1000 [7]. Second, with regard to population, studies have focused on volunteers of various classes and types [5,16,20,22,59,60], adolescents or youth [4,7,28,[34]…”

“…This modern disorder increases, in turn, the fear of losing immediate access to any information and communication with others [32], which raises the indicators concerning depression, anxiety, anger, aggressiveness [33], stress, nervousness [34], emotional stability [35], and sleep disorders [36].…”