Examining The Influence Of Adolescents’ Mobile Phone Use On Psychological Well-being

With the rapid development of communication technology and the continuous upgrading of intelligent devices,mobile phones have become indispensable living tools and communication media in modern society,and the users tend to be more younger than before.Adolescence is a critical period for individuals to mature.At this stage,individuals’ self-awareness expands and their sense of independence continues to increase.The emergence of smart phones has become a combustion agent for "bedroom culture" which makes the use of youth media more personalized,private and less controllable.In addition,the use of mobile phones has caused many problems,such as mobile phone addiction,privacy risk behavior,cyberbullying,etc.,and the resulting problems have also caused many discussions.At the same time,the media estrangement between family generations and the parent-child conflicts are particularly prominent Many studies have shown that the use of smart phones for adolescent has a significant impact on their mental health status,and although certain individual traits have been proven to be risk factors,few studies have discussed this phenomenon based on a family environment perspective.Based on the ecological systems theory,this study explored the impact of adolescents’ mobile phone use on their psychological well-being through family factors of parent-adolescent conflict over mobile phone use and family relationship quality.With data collected from 751 students in junior high school,the author analyses the data using the Structural Equation Model.The empirical results show that:First,all main variables differ by gender,age and grade.Second,the hypotheses in this research are validated to varying degrees:1)the intensity of adolescents’ mobile phone use was positively associated with both parent-adolescent conflict and family relationship quality;2)parent-adolescent conflict was significantly related to four psychological well-being factors,whereas family relationship quality was only significantly related to self-esteem,loneliness and depression.Furthermore,the mediation analyses revealed that the relationship between adolescents’ mobile phone use and their psychological well-being was mediated by parent-adolescent conflicts over mobile phone use but not by family relationship quality.Findings from this study contributed to the theoretical literature on our understanding of adolescents’ mobile phone use.They offered practical implications for parental guidance of adolescents’mobile phones and the improvement of adolescents’ psychological well-being.