Development and Validation Study of a Cell Phone Addiction Scale for Korean Children

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: This study was done to develop a cell phone addiction scale for Korean children. METHODS: The process included construction of a conceptual framework, generation of initial items, verification of content validity, selection of secondary items, preliminary study, and extraction of final items. The participants were 268 children from grades 4 to 6 in two urban elementary schools. Construct validity, internal consistence reliability, and split-half reliability were used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Nine items were categorized into 2 factors explaining 61.29% of total variance. The factors were labeled as obsessive compulsion (6 items) and dependency (3 items). Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the 9 items was .87, and Spearman-Brown coefficient was .83. Scale scores identified children as high risk users, at risk users, or average users by standard scores. CONCLUSION: The above findings indicate that the cell phone addiction scale for children has good validity and reliability when used with Korean children.