Association between overuse of mobile phones on quality of sleep and general health among occupational health and safety students

Abstract

Concerns about health problems due to the increasing use of mobile phones are growing. Excessive use of mobile phones can affect the quality of sleep as one of the important issues in the health literature and general health of people. Therefore, this study investigated the relationship between the excessive use of mobile phones and general health and quality of sleep on 450 Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) students in five universities of medical sciences in the North East of Iran in 2014. To achieve this objective, special questionnaires that included Cell Phone Overuse Scale, Pittsburgh's Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) were used, respectively. In addition to descriptive statistical methods, independent t-test, Pearson correlation, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multiple regression tests were performed. The results revealed that half of the students had a poor level of sleep quality and most of them were considered unhealthy. The Pearson correlation co-efficient indicated a significant association between the excessive use of mobile phones and the total score of general health and the quality of sleep. In addition, the results of the multiple regression showed that the excessive use of mobile phones has a significant relationship between each of the four subscales of general health and the quality of sleep. Furthermore, the results of the multivariate regression indicated that the quality of sleep has a simultaneous effect on each of the four scales of the general health. Overall, a simultaneous study of the effects of the mobile phones on the quality of sleep and the general health could be considered as a trigger to employ some intervention programs to improve their general health status, quality of sleep and consequently educational performance.

Types of smartphone usage and relations with problematic smartphone behaviors: The role of content consumption vs. social smartphone use

“…For example, problematic smartphone use is related to traffic accidents (Cazzulino, Burke, Muller, Arbogast, & Upperman, 2014;Thompson, Rivara, Ayyagari, & Ebel, 2013), shoulder and neck problems (Shan et al, 2013;Xie, Szeto, Dai, & Madeleine, 2016), sleep impairment (Demirci, Akgonul, & Akpinar, 2015;Eyvazlou, Zarei, Rahimi, & Abazari, 2016), academic problems (Seo, Park, Kim, & Park, 2016), and poor physical fitness (Rebold, Sheehan, Dirlam, Maldonado, & O'Donnell, 2016). Furthermore, problematic smartphone use is related to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression (reviewed in .…”

The effect of mobile phone usage on sleep quality in adolescents

“…Surveys on university students have found that sleep quality decreased as mobile phone dependency increased (Demirci et al, 2015;Sahin et al, 2013). In similar studies, there was a relationship between mobile phone use and sleep quality (Bruni et al, 2015;Eyvazlou et al, 2016;Mohammadbeigi et al, 2016;Yogesh et al, 2014). It was not possible to correlate the deterioration of the participants' sleep quality solely to mobile phone use.…”

“…Media content can cause extreme excitement or cause recurring voyages (Van den Bulck 2010). Research shows that there is a relationship between mobile phone usage and sleep quality (Bruni et al, 2015;Demirci et al, 2015;Eyvazlou et al, 2016;Mohammadbeigi et al, 2016;Sahin et al, 2013;Yogesh et al, 2014). In other studies on adolescents, it has been found that the use of telephone delayed (Bartel et al, 2015), the sleeping time, making sleeping difficult (Arora et al, 2014), which affects the sleeping negatively (shortening the duration of sleep) (Hale & Guan, 2015).…”

“…This form was created by the researcher for the purpose of gathering information related to the variables that had been determined to have an impact, according to a review of the relevant literature, on the children constituting the study sample (Arora et al, 2014;Bartel et al, 2015;Bruni et al, 2015;Cain & Gradisar, 2010;Demirci et al, 2015;Eyvazlou et al, 2016;Hale & Guan, 2015;Mohammadbeigi et al, 2016;Sahin et al, 2013;Mak et al, 2014;Yogesh et al, 2014).…”

Quality of sleep and use of computers and cell-phones among university students

“…In India, academic females of the 1st year of medicine who used their cell phones for more than 2 hours at night showed a significant correlation between more hours of use and worse quality of sleep (PSQI) 15 . Among 450 students of five universities of medical sciences in Iran, there was a significant correlation between the excessive use of cell phones and the total score of general health and worse quality of sleep (PSQI) 16 . In a study with 350 students of psychology in the United States, there was no correlation between the general use of cell phones and the quality of sleep (Sleep Quality Index).…”