Smoking and smartphone addiction among youth: the differentating role of motivations in cluster analysis

Abstract

The widespread prevalence of smartphones particularly affects the generations of high school and university students; for them being online continuously has become inevitable part of their lives supported by their smartphones. However, besides many advantages, we should also count with some negative consequences, among others, the development of addiction. While it belongs to behavioral addictions, its relationship with other addictions (like smoking) is a relatively undiscovered field yet. In this study we investigated associations between smoking and smartphone addiction by means of motivational attitudes related to smoking. Participants were high school and university students (N = 295; aged between 15-30 years of age). The data collection was partly online, partly based on paper-and-pencil survey. Using cluster analysis, we identified four clusters. The first cluster was not susceptible to either smoking or smartphone addiction. In the second cluster smoking showed fairly high frequency but these youth were not addictive to smartphone use. Smartphone addiction was going together with high smoking rate in the third cluster, whereas the fourth one was characterized by high susceptibility to smartphone addiction but low rate of smoking. The latter cluster mostly consisted of high school students: as it seems, these youth tend to show a decreasing rate of smoking but a rising occurrence of smartphone addiction. On the contrary, those above 20 years smoked in considerably higher rate and their motivational attitudes also served as positive reinforcement towards smoking but they were less susceptible to smartphone addiction. Based on these results we can conclude that youth’s susceptibility to  addiction may be influenced by motivations and other factors that need to be explored.