Examination of educational faculty students' smart phone addiction levels and overcoming strategies

With the development of mobile technologies, individuals often use smart phones in their daily lives. The reason for preferring these devices is access to the Internet, application installation, as well as features such as being portable and ability to perform operations that a computer can. However, these devices cause negative effects such as nomophobia as a result of excessive and out of purpose use of individuals. Nomophobia is defined as the fear that individuals experience when they are unable to access their mobile device for any reason or when they cannot communicate with the mobile device. Smartphone adiction, it is seen that there is a behavioral dependence type when the literature is examined. Smart Phone Addiction is considered important in terms of causing anxiety, stress and delaying daily plans when individuals can not access their phones. With this research, it is aimed to investigate the smart phone addiction levels of university students and the strategies of coping with smart phone addiction. For this purpose, the sample includes the students of the Faculty of Education at a state university, which was selected by easily accessible sampling method in the 2018-2019 academic year. In the study, data obtained from "Personal Information Form", "Smart Phone Dependency Scale" and "Survey on Determining Coping Strategies for Smart Phone Addiction" developed by the researchers were used. These data were analyzed with "SPSS 22" program and significance level was evaluated at 0,05 level. The findings obtained as a result of the analysis were presented under the relevant topics according to the purposes of the research. In conclusion, considering the cut-off scores of the scale used in the research, it was concluded that 306 out of 701 female students (43.65%) and 101 out of 246 male students (41.05%) had a high risk of dependency. In addition, there were no statistically significant differences according to gender, class level, department and years of smart phone usage, and there was a significant difference according to age and average monthly internet usage quota. According to another finding of the study, it was found that there was a significant difference between the average number of daily talking, messaging, entertainment (video, games, social media, etc.), educational usage and internet usage with the smartphone addiction. It is concluded that the increase in the duration of the other uses other than the educational use of these devices increases the level of smartphone addiction. For dealing with smartphone addiction, students often preferred strategies such as sparing time for their hobbies, leaving their smartphones to a place where they cannot see (e.g. lock in the closet), not getting mobile packages or choosing limited packages, keeping the phone off, spending time with the social circle or family members, and deleting social media accounts.