Institute of Culture and Society, University of Navarra, 31008 Pamplona, Spain.
School of Education and Psychology, University of Navarra, 31008 Pamplona, Spain.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Dec 30;19(1):358. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19010358.
The smartphone revolution has placed powerful, multipurpose devices in the hands of youth across the globe, prompting worries about the potential negative consequences of these technologies on mental health. Many assessment tools have been created, seeking to classify individuals into problematic and non-problematic smartphone users. These are identified using a cutoff value: a threshold, within the scale range, at which higher scores are expected to be associated with negative outcomes. Lacking a clinical assessment of individuals, the establishment of this threshold is challenging. We illustrate this difficulty by calculating cutoff values for the Short Version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS-SV) in 13 Spanish-speaking samples in 11 countries, using common procedures (i.e., reliability, validity, ROC methodology). After showing that results can be very heterogeneous (i.e., they lead to diverse cutoff points and rates of addiction) depending on the decisions made by the researchers, we call for caution in the use of these classifications, particularly when researchers lack a clinical definition of true addiction-as is the case with most available scales in the field of behavioral addictions-which can cause an unnecessary public health alert.
智能手机革命将功能强大、用途多样的设备交到了全球各地年轻人的手中，这引发了人们对于这些技术对心理健康可能产生的负面影响的担忧。为此，已经开发出了许多评估工具，旨在将个体分为有问题和无问题的智能手机用户。这些工具是通过使用一个截止值（即量表范围内的一个阈值）来确定的，在此阈值之上，更高的分数预计与负面结果相关。由于缺乏对个体的临床评估，因此确定这个截止值具有挑战性。我们通过在 11 个国家的 13 个西班牙语样本中使用常见的程序（即可靠性、有效性、ROC 方法），为智能手机成瘾量表（SAS-SV）的简短版本计算截止值，来说明这种困难。在展示了研究人员的决策会导致结果非常多样化（即，它们导致不同的截止点和成瘾率）之后，我们呼吁在使用这些分类时要谨慎，特别是当研究人员缺乏真正成瘾的临床定义时——这是行为成瘾领域大多数现有量表的情况——这可能会引起不必要的公共卫生警报。
