Investigation of parents' relationship with their children and their status of being phubber

Smartphones have become indispensable in many areas of daily lives with the rapid development of technology. Excessive use of smartphones does not just make most daily routines easier, but also brings risks with it. It is observed that behavior of phubbing, which is defined as virtual addiction, and continues to exist especially in the family, is becoming more widespread every day. It can be said that the behavior of phubbing prevents interpersonal interaction and negatively affects communication among family members. Therefore, our research was conducted with 400 people selected from people who have children. 206 of the participants are mothers, and 194 of the participants are fathers. The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between parents` relationship with their children and their status as being a phubber, and to determine whether that the relationship between parents and children is negative or positive significantly predicts the phubber scores of the parents. The General Phubbing Scale (GSOS), the Parent-Child Relationship Scale (EPRS) and the Personal Information Form were used to collect the data. SPSS program was used to analyze the data. As a result of The Pearson Correlation coefficient method, to determine the relationships between phubbing and parent-child relationship levels, it was concluded that there was a negative (r=-0.14) significant (p<.01) relationship between phubbing and parent-child relationship. According to the results of the Regression analysis conducted to see whether the positive and negative relationship scores of parents` relationship with their children predict their phubbing scores, it was determined that the levels of positive parent-child relationship and negative parent-child relationship, which are the sub-dimensions of parent-child relationship, predict phubbing at the rate of 7%. Moreover, positive parent-child relationship scores of parents predicted phubbing scores to a considerable extent while negative parent-child relationship scores of parents did not significantly predict phubbing scores According to the results of the Independent Samples T test, which was conducted to find out whether there is a significant difference according to gender and actively used social media account variables, there is a significant difference between the phubbing score averages of male and female parents. According to the results of the One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), which was conducted to find out whether parents` phubbing levels vary according to the variables of age, education status, economic level, occupation, daily phone usage time, it was concluded that there was a significant difference between the variables of age, education status, occupation, daily phone usage time, and phubbing score averages, however; there was no significant difference between the economic level variable and the mean score of phubbing. It is thought that interpersonal communication will be damaged with the increase in phubbing behavior, thus the quality of the relationship between parents and their children in the family, which is the basic building block of society, will decrease. It can be said that when people use digital devices consciously, and parents spend more time with their children in order to improve face-to-face communication and increase the quality of the relationship, the risk of phubbing behavior will decrease, and thus we can be prevented from being a phubber. Keywords: Phubbing, Phubber, Parent-Child Relationship