Smartphone Addiction Scale – Short Version

Authors

Purpose

The primary impetus for developing the SAS-SV was the critical need for an age-appropriate, time-efficient screening mechanism for teenagers. While the original 33-item scale provided a comprehensive evaluation of Smartphone Addiction, it was normed primarily on adult and university populations and lacked definitive diagnostic thresholds. adolescents are particularly susceptible to digital behavioral addictions due to their rapid adoption of new media, reliance on peer-oriented social networking, and developing impulse control.

The SAS-SV bridges a significant gap in the field by offering a streamlined assessment that minimizes respondent burden while providing validated, gender-specific cut-off scores. This makes it an invaluable asset for large-scale epidemiological surveys, school-based screenings, and routine clinical intake procedures where time and resources are limited, allowing practitioners to swiftly move from assessment to targeted intervention.

Construct

The psychological construct of Smartphone Addiction is conceptualized as a Behavioral Addiction that mirrors the symptom profile of traditional substance dependence. This theoretical framework posits that excessive smartphone use leads to observable clinical symptoms, including tolerance (needing progressively more screen time to achieve satisfaction), withdrawal (experiencing irritability, anxiety, or distress when the device is inaccessible), and significant impairment in daily functioning.

The SAS-SV captures these core dimensions by sampling items that reflect daily-life disturbance, positive anticipation of use, cyberspace-oriented relationship preference, and loss of control. Rather than treating smartphone use as a mere habit or a secondary symptom of generalized internet use, the scale operationalizes it as a distinct, compulsive behavior that actively interferes with an adolescent's academic performance, social relationships, and overall psychological well-being.

Validity

The validation process for the SAS-SV was exceptionally rigorous, anchoring self-report data against actual clinical diagnostic interviews. Concurrent validity was established by demonstrating strong positive correlations with existing measures, including the Smartphone Addiction Proneness Scale and the original full-length SAS. Interestingly, correlations with a generalized internet addiction scale were only moderate (r=0.611 for boys, r=0.375 for girls), highlighting that Smartphone Addiction is a distinct construct with unique mobile and social networking features rather than just a subset of internet addiction.

The most compelling validity evidence comes from the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis, which compared scale scores against evaluations by clinical psychologists. The resulting Area Under the Curve (AUC) values were outstanding—0.963 for boys and 0.947 for girls—indicating exceptional diagnostic accuracy. This analysis allowed researchers to establish highly sensitive and specific clinical cut-off scores (31 for boys, 33 for girls) that reliably distinguish between addicted and non-addicted adolescents.

Convergent & Discriminant Validation Correlations

Reliability

Psychometric evaluation of the SAS-SV revealed excellent internal consistency, which is particularly impressive for a brief 10-item instrument. The scale demonstrated a Cronbach's alpha of 0.91, indicating that the items are highly intercorrelated and reliably measure the underlying, unified construct of Smartphone Addiction.

Furthermore, the corrected item-total correlations ranged from 0.50 to 0.80, confirming that every single item contributes meaningfully to the total score without being overly redundant. The analysis also showed that removing any individual item would decrease the overall alpha to below 0.90, cementing the necessity and reliability of the chosen 10-item set for consistent measurement across adolescent respondents.

Factor Analysis

Rather than conducting a traditional exploratory or confirmatory factor analysis on a new pool of items, the development of the SAS-SV relied on a robust content validity approach to distill the original 6-factor, 33-item scale. A panel of experts evaluated the original items to identify those most representative of the core addiction construct in adolescents.

Items were retained only if they achieved a Content Validity Index (CVI) greater than 0.78, ensuring high expert consensus (the mean I-CVI was 0.943). This methodological approach ensured that the abbreviated 10-item scale maintained the theoretical breadth of the original instrument—covering withdrawal, tolerance, and daily life disturbance—while functioning as a cohesive, unidimensional screening tool optimized for clinical classification rather than multidimensional profiling.

Instrument

Scoring & Interpretation Guidelines

Smartphone Addiction Scale – Short Version Items

Sample

The sample consisted of 540 valid responses from second-year junior high school students (343 boys and 197 girls) recruited from two schools in the Kangwon province of South Korea. The average age of the participants was 14.5 years.

Permissions & Test Year

Published in PLoS ONE, an open-access journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Test Year: 2013