The Use of Smartphones to Cope with Stress in University Students: Helpful or Harmful?

Abstract

Although research into the effects of stress on university students is plentiful, research on the association between technology and stress is not. The increasing access to smartphones raises concerns about their impact on university students' abilities to deal with stress. The present study aims to understand stress in university students as well as the impact that smartphones have on coping with stress. Emotion-focused coping, avoidance-focused coping, and problem-focused coping were examined to better understand stress in this sample. A total of 250 university students completed the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and Test of Mobile Phone Dependence (TMD). The Brief COPE was used to measure emotion-and problem-focused coping and the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-2 (AAQ-II) was used to measure avoidance coping. Students who were highly stressed were also more dependent on their smartphones. Smartphone use to cope was also associated with smartphone dependency, and smartphone dependency was highly associated with avoidance and emotion-focused coping. It was also found that students reported being almost as likely to use music and talking with friends and family to cope with stress, as they are to use their smartphone to cope with said stress. This study illustrates that smartphones may be both helpful and harmful to a university student's ability to combat stress but that it may depend on the student's coping methods and the extent of their usage. Future research is needed to examine individuals' smartphone usage in order to understand whether specific applications may have an effect on coping methods and stress levels.

Fear of COVID-19, loneliness, smartphone addiction, and mental wellbeing among the Turkish general population: a serial mediation model

“…One of the important markers of smartphone addiction is the increased frequency of smartphone use (Elhai et al 2017;Jiang, Li, and Shypenka 2018) which may lead to addiction in a minority of individuals. Excessive smartphone use is an ineffective coping strategy (Flynn, Thériault, and Williams 2020;Zhai et al 2020) which may lower the wellbeing of individuals.…”

A systematic review on relationship between stress and problematic smartphone use

“…Most of the studies reviewed are conducted in China (n=17) [12]- [23], [27]- [29], [35], [36], [41], [44], [45], [47]. Although they are relatively scant, some studies are also conducted in other countries such as Korea (n=3) [42], [43], [46], India (n=2) [33], [48], Malaysia (n=2) [14], [24], Turkey (n=2) [38], [39], United States (n=1) [13], Canada (n=1) [34], Netherlands (n=1) [31], Brazil (n=1) [49], Oman (n=1) [40], and Lebanon (n=1) [30]. There are also studies that have not specified the location of studies (n=3) [32], [37], [50].…”

“…The sample size of the studies reviewed are highly varied, which ranges from 96 (n=1) [49] to 5109 samples (n=1) [45]. Of these, majority of the studies reviewed have used 100-500 participants (n=16) [12], [13], [23], [29], [30]- [34], [37], [39], [40], [43], [46], [48], [50]. Other studies reviewed have involved 500-1,000 (n=13) [14], [17], [18], [21], [22], [24], [27], [28], [36], [38], [41], [42], [44], 1,000-2,000 (n=3) [20], [35], [47], and 2,000-3,000 participants (n=1) [19].…”

“…Regarding sampling methods, many studies reviewed have regrettably not specified their sampling method (n=15) [12], [19], [20], [21], [22], [24], [31], [32], [34], [38], [42], [43], [46], [49], [50]. Among those studies that have specified their sampling method, the most reported sampling method is convenience sampling (n=15) [13], [17], [18], [23], [27], [28], [29], [33], [35], [36], [37], [39], [40], [47], [48].…”

Using Mixed Methods to Assess the Coping and Self-regulation Skills of Undergraduate Social Work Students Impacted by COVID-19

“…This abbreviated inventory of the complete 60-item COPE Inventory (Carver et al 1989) reliably assessed the frequency with which different coping strategies were used, rated on a scale from 1, ("I haven't been doing this at all") to 4, ("I've been doing this a lot"). The brief COPE has been used extensively to assess coping, and found to be a reliable and valid measure with college students overall (Cramer et al 2020;Flynn et al 2020), including those in allied professions such as nursing (Ab Latif and Mat Nor 2016) and pharmacy (Garber 2017). Carver (1997) designed the brief COPE to assess 14 distinct domains, warning against combining them into an overall measure unless indicated by analysis of individual data using reliability testing and/or factor analyses.…”