Can’t stop won’t stop: problematic phone use, sleep quality, and mental health in U.S. Graduate students

Abstract

Objective

Prior work has suggested the impact of problematic phone use on the mental health of graduate students. This research explores the mediating effect of sleep quality on this link.

Participants

A total of 186 graduate students from the United States were collected using an online data acquisition platform. Graduate study areas represented a wide range of subjects.

Methods

Participants completed questionnaires about problematic phone use, sleep quality, and both anxiety and depressive symptoms. Phone use was further broken down into time spent on specific phone applications.

Results

Analyses revealed significant indirect effects from problematic phone use to both depression and anxiety through diminished sleep quality. Effects were stronger for individuals who spent higher amounts of time on social media applications.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that U.S. graduate students are particularly prone to the negative effects of problematic phone use. Implications for interventions in graduate programs are discussed.

Keywords:

• Graduate students
• problematic phone use
• sleep quality

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States of America and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of Penn State University.

Data availability statement

Data can be found at the following anonymized link: https://osf.io/8t2bg/?view_only=03f33b581ded42d59ff9559cd33afba6

Notes

1 One may consider if inclusion of the social media scores altered the significance of these effects. Running a model including social media use as a covariate revealed nearly identical significant indirect effects for the PPU-sleep trouble-Depression pathway (ME = .19, p < .001) and the PPU-sleep trouble-Anxiety pathway (ME = .35, p < .001).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.