Smartphone Addiction in Mexican Engineering Students

Abstract

Students academic performance could be affected by excessive use of the smartphone. This study focuses on analyzing the level of cell phone addiction in engineering university students. It also seeks to determine if there is a difference by gender in this behavior. 306 engineering students from a Technological Institute in Veracruz, Mexico participated in the study. The instrument used to obtain data was SAS-SV (Smartphone addiction scale-short version) designed by [1]. In order to identify the set of indicators with the highest factor loadings, an exploratory factor analysis was carried out with extraction of components and orthogonal rotation with the Varimax method. To identify if there is a difference by gender, the t test is used to contrast the hypothesis about two independent population means. The findings demonstrated the extraction of two components, which differs from the one-dimensional model proposed by [1], and no difference was found between the groups of male and female students.