A systematic review on nomophobia prevalence: Surfacing results and standard guidelines for future research

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE A systematic review on nomophobia prevalence: Surfacing results and standard guidelines for future research Ana C. León-Mejı́a ID1☯*, Mónica Gutiérrez-Ortega1☯, Isabel Serrano-Pintado ID2, Joaquı́n González-Cabrera ID1 1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), Madrid, Spain, 2 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: León-Mejı́a AC, Gutiérrez-Ortega M, Serrano-Pintado I, González-Cabrera J (2021) A systematic review on nomophobia prevalence: Surfacing results and standard guidelines for future research. PLoS ONE 16(5): e0250509. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250509 Editor: Giuseppe Carrà, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, ITALY Received: November 22, 2020 Accepted: April 7, 2021 Background Mobile phones allow us to stay connected with others and provide us a sense of security. We can work, chat with family and friends, take pictures, buy clothes or books, and even control home appliances. They play such a significant role in our lives that we feel anxious without them. In some cases, the relationship between humans and these communication devices have become problematic. Nomophobia (NMP) is the fear of becoming incommunicable, separated from the mobile phone and losing connection to the Internet. Since this social phobia was coined in the first decade of the XXI century, a growing number of studies have studied it and reported the prevalence of this technology-related problem. However, this research activity has generated mixed results regarding how we assess and report nomophobia and who may be at a higher risk of suffering or developing it. Published: May 18, 2021 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250509 Copyright: © 2021 León-Mejı́a et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript. Funding: This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Methods We conducted a systematic review of 108 studies published in English and Spanish and collected them in Parsifal. We searched for assessment and prevalence data on nomophobia. Also, we looked at gender and age differences to identify risk factors and see if these differences exist and emerge worldwide. Results In this study, we find that women and younger individuals suffer more from nomophobia. The disparity in reporting the prevalence of nomophobia is enormous since the percentages of “at-risk” participants go from 13% to 79%, and participants suffering from it are between 6% and 73%, being the score in the range of 45.5 and 93.82. Within the group of nomophobic people, moderate cases vary between 25.7% and 73.3%, and severe cases, between 1% and 87%. Such disparity is due to differences in assessment criteria. Females and young people seem to be more vulnerable to nomophobia although methodological disparity PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250509 May 18, 2021 1 / 22 PLOS ONE Competitiveness, RTI2018-094212-B-I00: (CIBERAACC), and PID2019-107589GB-I00, and it was also supported by the International University of La Rioja, Project Cyberpsychology (Triennium 20172020). A systematic review on nomophobia prevalence makes it difficult to reach definitive conclusions. We conclude our review by recommending some common guidelines for guiding future research. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Nomophobia (No-Mobile-Phone Phobia) is a modern-day problem that was first coined by the UK Post Office in 2008. The Post Office ordered a research organization called YouGov to examine whether phone users in the UK were experiencing anxiety over their mobile phones. It was found that almost 13 million people reported being anxious when losing their mobile or forgetting to take the phone with them, running out of battery, having no network coverage, and when not receiving any calls, texts or emails for some time, which represents a 53% of the surveyed [1]. In this way, society was ahead of science in identifying a phenomenon that was raising social concern: the relationship with our mobiles and the alleg problems created by this technological link. Let us remember that mobiles appeared early in the seventies. And since then mobile connections (8.97 billion) have surpassed the number of people in the world (7.8 billion), becoming the fastest-growing human-made technology that has ever existed [2]. These devices are continuously evolving to be more attractive, compelling, and faster, and mobile companies are also competing to offer us new models with more memory, better cameras, and batteries, while the number of apps and services are also constantly increasing, making us dependent on them. We have named a problem—nomophobia—but we are just beginning to understand why people experience anxiety when being out of touch or why they never want to turn their mobile off, and why our mobiles are the first thing to check in the morning and the latest at night. In order to answer all these questions, we need to understand this phenomenon better. King [3, 4], and Yildirim [5] were the first scholars to address this task. In the study by King et al. [3], nomophobia was regarded as a 21st-century disorder resulting from information and communication technologies. They posited that nomophobia comes from the fear of not being able to communicate with others and being separated from the mobile or not connected to the Internet. In another work, King et al. [4] spoke of nomophobia as a situational phobia characterized by a fear of becoming distressed and not getting any assistance. Yildirim [5] operationalized this theoretical construct into a research instrument consisting of a self-reported measure (the Nomophobia Questionnaire, NMP-Q) that examines our relationship with smartphones, i.e., mobiles with internet connections that run software programs in a way similar to a computer. In doing so, nomophobia was linked to a problematic mobile phone use, defined as an incapacity to control and regulate the use of the mobile phone and suffering negative daily life consequences. After the NMP-Q was developed and proved to be a valid instrument to assess this problem, many scholars have translated and adapted i (...truncated)