Study Finds Adolescents Spend Nearly 1/4 of School Day on Smartphones

New York Governor Hochul recently released a report, “More Learning, Less Scrolling,” to prohibit smartphone use during the school day. A team of public health and pediatric researchers, led by Lauren Hale of Stony Brook University, are working to understand not just screen time use by adolescents but the duration and content of that use, particularly during school.

In a new study that monitored smartphone data, they found that adolescents (aged 13 to 18) spent an average of 1.5 hours each school day on their smartphones. Their findings are highlighted in the JAMA Pediatrics research letter, “Adolescent Smartphone Use During School Hours,” published February 3.

“Unfortunately, too much of the existing research on digital media use relies upon self-reported data. In this study, we were able to objectively assess smartphone use, enabling a much more granular understanding of timing and content of smartphone use,” explained Hale, senior author of the letter and professor in the Program in Public Health and in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.

“As a public health researcher and a mother of two middle schoolers, I am concerned that too many kids are missing out on both learning and in-person social opportunities during the school day by looking at their phones,” Hale continued. “School hours are precious.”

Hale led the Stony Brook University team that developed the IRB-approved study protocol. The team then hired a survey research firm, Ipsos, to recruit a national sample of participants and complete the survey.

As part of the protocol, nearly 300 participants completed a 15-minute smartphone-based survey and installed RealityMeter to measure smartphone use. Hale and colleagues analyzed the data from the survey and constrained the sample to those who collated smartphone data for two or more school days a week, creating a total sample of 117 eligible adolescents.

In this sample, adolescents’ average smartphone use was 1.5 hours during the school day. Moreover, over 25 percent of the sampled adolescents spent more than two hours on their smartphones during school.

Excluding Internet browsing, the five most-used apps by the adolescents were text messaging, Instagram, video streaming, audio and email.

Hale and colleagues believe the results warrant the need for more similar surveys with larger sample sizes and recruitment that would include a broader segment of society. They concluded that “Parents and adolescents may derive benefit from access to phones for communication and learning purposes during school. However, application usage data from this study suggest that most school-day smartphone use appears incongruous with that purpose. The analyses show high levels of social media use during school.”

This research was supported by the Della Pietra Family Foundation.