<p>Psychometric properties of the Brief Symptom Inventory in nomophobic subjects: insights from preliminary confirmatory factor, exploratory factor, and clustering analyses in a sample of healthy Italian volunteers</p>

Abstract

BackgroundThe Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), developed by Derogatis in 1975, represents an important standardized screening instrument that enables one to quantitatively assess psychological distress and psychiatric disorders. The BSI is a 53-item self-report scale, measuring nine dimensions that can be summed up to reflect three global indices, including the General Severity Index (GSI). In the era of new information and communication technologies, nomophobia (“no mobile phobia”) is an emerging disorder, characterized by the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Nothing is known, however, about the factor structure and reliability of the BSI in a population of nomophobic subjects. This study aimed at addressing this gap in knowledge.MethodsA sample of 403 subjects aged 27.91±8.63 years (160 males, 39.7% of the entire sample, and 243 females, 60.3%), recruited via snowball sampling, volunteered to take part in the study. The Italian versions of the Nomophobia questionnaire and the BSI were administered. Exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, and clustering analysis were carried out together with correlation analysis, analysis of variance, and multivariate regression analysis.ResultsFor each BSI subscale, scores were significantly higher than the norms. The nine subscales exhibited acceptable-to-good Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, varying from 0.733 for psychoticism to 0.875 for depression. Overall, the reliability of the entire instrument proved to be excellent (alpha coefficient=0.972). Furthermore, all BSI subscales as well as BSI synthetic indexes correlated with nomophobia in a significant way. Stratifying the population according to the severity of nomophobia (mild, 206 individuals, 51.1% of the sample; moderate, 167 subjects, 41.4%; and severe, 30 individuals, 7.4%), the GSI score could distinguish (P<0.001) between mild and moderate (0.99±0.71 vs 1.32±0.81) and between mild and severe (0.99±0.71 vs 1.54±0.79) nomophobia, although not between moderate and severe nomophobia (P>0.05). Similar patterns could be found for the other subscales of the BSI. Finally, looking at the fit indexes, the second-order 9-factor model best fit the data compared with the Derogatis 1-factor model.ConclusionThe findings of our study show that the BSI is a reliable and valid instrument with acceptable psychometric properties, and can be administered to populations of nomophobic subjects.

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

“…Finally, the articles aimed at validating an instrument for measuring nomophobia stand out. They have adapted the tool proposed by Yildrim and Correia [24] to different country contexts, such as Iran [7], Spain [17,27,28], and Israel [14], reaffirming its factors of validity and reliability [12]. Some review articles were also included [17,38,65].…”

“…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 [58], and loneliness and self-happiness [26]. Moreover, others have studied the relationship between nomophobia and sociological, educational, and other factors, including Internet usage and social media [29,37], academic performance [2], learning and attention [13,62], socio-educational variables and collectivism [63], and social threat [11].…”

“…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]…”

“…Most studies have conducted their research exclusively using the Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q) [1,2,4,7,13,14,18,19,22,24,[27][28][29][30][31][32]34,62,64] proposed by [24], which has been adequate and adapted to Persian [7], Indian [2], Spanish [27,28,34], Israeli [14], Italian [12], and Arabic [22] contexts. Other researchers have also added another measuring instrument, such as the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) [12,14], Obsessiveness Content Scale (OBS) [25], ultrasonography of the median nerve, Phalen's test, and reverse Phalen's test [61], FOMO Scale [15], UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS-8), Self-Happiness Scale and Rosenberg' Self-Esteem Scale [26], Stress Scale Social Threat Scale [11], Brief Symptom Inventory [12], Mobile Phone Involvement Questionnaire (MPIQ) [35], Scale of Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) and Scale of Attention Awareness Mindful-Warning (MAAS) [39], Mindful-Awareness Scale (MAAS) [58], Individualism-Collectivism (INDCOL) [63], Problematic Internet Use Scale (PIUS), Social Appearance Anxiety Scale (SAAS) and Social media use integration scale [37], Emotional Intelli...…”

“…Smartphone addiction is so prevalent that it is already considered to be like any other addiction to harmful substances. Therefore, it is a public health problem [9], which is why, because of the excessive use of this device [10] and the dependence that this technology generates [11], a new pathology known as nomophobia is emerging [12] and being cataloged as a clinical disorder [13].…”