College goers check smartphones more than 150 times a day: Study

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Representational Image
Representational Image

New Delhi : The phone, today, is not just a device to make phone calls and exchange messages. From video calls to social chat to photography and more, a smartphone has all in store for tech-savvy people. A study reveals that, on an average, a college student in India checks his mobile phone over 150 times a day. The study has been conducted by Aligarh Muslim University and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).

The research, titled as Smartphone Dependency, Hedonism and Purchase Behaviour: Implications for Digital India Initiatives, has been conducted in 20 central universities, where 200 students from each university were interviewed.

“Anxiety and fear of missing out on information make university students check their mobile devices as many as 150 times a day on an average, an activity which can have adverse effects on the students’ health as well as academics. “Only 26 per cent of the respondents said they use smartphones primarily to make calls. The remaining respondents use smartphones for other purposes such as accessing social networking sites, Google searches and for entertainment such as watching movies,” said Mohammed Naved Khan, the Project Director.

Study concludes that at least 14 per cent of the students use smartphones for three hours or less in a day while around 63 per cent of them use it for four to seven hours daily. “It came as a shock to us that around 23 per cent (of students) use the devices for more than eight hours a day,” Khan added. According to the study, eighty per cent of the students own a mobile phone and most of them prefer smartphones due to various kinds of applications, host of features, and ease of use and also work as affordable alternative for a computer/laptop.