Fear of missing out, Fear of positive and negative evaluation, Problematic smart phone usages and Smart phone addiction among University Students

Abstract

The present research aimed at studying the relationship between fear of missing out (FOMO), fear of positive and negative evaluation, problematic mobile phone usage and smartphone addiction among university students. Furthermore, the relationship of age, gender, education, models of mobile phones and why they used this mobile phone models was also explored with study variables. The sample (N=350) comprised of university students with age ranging from 18 to 30 years. The data was collected by using purposive and snowball sampling techniques from university students. The Fear of Missing out Scale (Przybylski et al., 2013), Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (Week & Howell, 2012), Fear of Negatives Evaluation Scale (Leary, 1983), Problematic Usage of Mobile Phone Scale (Merlo, Stone & Bibbey, 2013), and Smart Phone Addiction Scale (Kwon, 2013) were used to assess study variables. The cronbach’s alpha of the study measures ranged from .71 to .90, providing evidence for internal consistency of the study measures. Correlation analysis was carried out to explore the relationship between study variables. The results of correlation analysis indicated that there was a significant positive relationship between fear of missing out, fear of positive and negative evaluation, problematic smart phone usage and smart phone addiction among university students. Regression analysis indicated that problematic smartphone usage and fear of negative evaluation predicted smartphone addiction accounting for 68 % variance. Comparison across gender indicated that males scored higher on fear of missing out, problematic smartphone usage and smart phone addiction in comparison to females. Non-significant difference was apparent across fear of positive and negative evaluation. Significant difference across age was apparent on problematic smartphone usage where early adults scored higher in comparison to late adolescents. Significant differences across problematic mobile phone user and non-problematic mobile phone user was apparent on all study variables. Findings of present research were discussed in the light of existing literature.