Measuring digital well-being in everyday life among Slovenian adolescents: The Perceived Digital Well-Being in Adolescence Scale

ABSTRACT

Previous research has mostly correlated screen time with adolescents’ social, cognitive, and emotional well-being outcomes, while overlooking adolescents’ subjective experiences of smartphone use. The present research filled this gap by developing and validating the Perceived Digital Well-Being in Adolescence Scale (PDWBA). This semantic differential scale was developed by conducting a literature review and five cognitive interviews with Slovenian adolescents and then tested in two cross-sectional studies. A total of 161 Slovenian adolescents participated in Study 1 (M_age = 17.87, SD_age = 1.23), and 1,040 Slovenian adolescents (M_age = 15.28, SD_age = 1.79) participated in Study 2. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated a stable three-factor model consisting of perceived digital well-being subscales in the social, cognitive, and emotional domains. Construct validity tests were performed and metric invariance across sex was established. The descriptive results showed that adolescents’ perceived digital well-being differed according to sex, age, and educational track. We discuss the scale’s theoretical and practical relevance and formulate suggestions for future research.

Impact summary

Prior State of Knowledge

Prior quantitative research has demonstrated mixed, positive, and negative effects of screen time on well-being outcomes. This research has not considered adolescents’ subjective experiences, as a valid instrument to capture them is lacking.

Novel contributions

We developed the Perceived Digital Well-Being in Adolescence Scale, which captures adolescents’ self-perceived digital well-being in the social, cognitive, and emotional domains. This scale helps quantitative scholars acknowledge that adolescents’ experiences with smartphone use are subjective and socially constructed.

Practical implications

Educators and practitioners are offered a novel tool to assess adolescents’ self-perceived digital well-being. This tool allows educators and practitioners to identify which adolescents experience the positive or negative effects of their smartphone use.

KEYWORDS:

• Scale development
• digital well-being
• perceptions
• smartphone effects
• adolescence

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the colleagues who have informally given feedback on the paper, including Dr. Orpha de Lenne, Anaëlle Gonzalez, Dr. Chelly Maes, and Dr. Anneleen Meeus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We chose the semantic-differential scale to optimize the questionnaire as it offers fewer measurement errors and consists of fewer items than Likert-type scales (Helwig & Avitable, 2004).

2. Cognitive interviewing is a qualitative approach using a set of techniques (i.e., the think-aloud protocol, intensive verbal probes, or a hybrid model) that deeply analyzes participants’ understanding of the survey questions. The hybrid model uses both think-aloud and verbal probing techniques (Ryan et al., 2012).

3. For example, we replaced the word “disinformed” with “less informed,” and the phrase “more efficient” with “faster” We changed the item “… have the worst possible life for me.” or “… have the best possible life for me.” to “… feel my life is worse than most teens.” or “… feel my life is better than most teens.”

4. Parallel analysis was conducted with 20 bootstraps. The values of the original (and simulated) eigenvalues for each factor were: Factor 1: 5.44 (0.80), Factor 2: 1.46 (0.55), Factor 3: 1.07 (0.45).

5. Because of my smartphone use, I … (a) “… am more distracted when doing my daily tasks (e.g., schoolwork)” or (b) “… am more focused when doing my daily tasks (e.g., schoolwork).”

6. Because of my smartphone use, I … (a) “… feel less informed about the world” or (b) “… feel more informed about the world.”

7. More information about the project is available on the website: https://www.projectmimic.eu.

8. As the Study was part of a four-month panel study, adolescents assessed the PDWBA and Identity Distress measure for the past four months.

9. Construct validity analyses of Study 2 were not preregistered.

10. We thank the Reviewer for these suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant agreement number 852317].

Notes on contributors

Jasmina Rosič

Jasmina Rosič, (MA, University of Ljubljana) is a PhD Student at the School for Mass Communication Research at KU Leuven (Belgium), supervised by L. Vandenbosch and B. Lobe. Her current research focuses on adolescents’ positive subjective experiences with mobile connectivity, more precisely, digital flourishing and perceived digital well-being.

Luca Carbone

Luca Carbone, (MA, Tilburg University) is a PhD Student at the School for Mass Communication Research at KU Leuven (Belgium), supervised by L. Vandenbosch. His research focuses on success narratives, mainstream music, and media entertainment effects on adolescents’ beliefs and well-being outcomes.

Mariek M. P. Vanden Abeele

Mariek Vanden Abeele is an Associate Professor in Digital Culture at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of Ghent University, Belgium, and an affiliated researcher at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. She combines media psychological and media sociological perspectives to better understand the role that digital media use plays in everyday life and society.

Bojana Lobe

Bojana Lobe is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), where she teaches several methodological courses (statistics, questionnaire design, qualitative methods, comparative research, digital technologies, and data collection). Her research interests include online qualitative research methods, mixed methods and multimethod designs, qualitative comparative analysis, researching children’s experiences and digital technologies.

Laura Vandenbosch

Laura Vandenbosch is an Associate Professor and coordinator at the School for Mass Communication Research at KU Leuven (Belgium). Her research focuses on youth’s digital media uses and their links to well-being. Her research has been honored with several awards (e.g., ICA Young Scholar Award) and grants (e.g., ERC starting grant, see http://www.projectmimic.eu/).