PERCEIVED PARENTAL PHUBBING AND ITS INFLUENCE ON ADOLESCENT SMARTPHONE ADDICTION: THE MODERATING ROLE OF GENDER

Abstract

Adolescents who are ignored by parents because of frequent smartphone use (parental phubbing) may begin to see excessive phone use as normal and are more likely to copy this behavior themselves (Hong et al., 2019; Xie et al., 2019). Extending this empirical work, the present study examines the role of gender as a moderator in the association between perceived parental phubbing and smartphone addiction among adolescents. A sample of 547 adolescents (girls=279; boys=268) age ranging between 15 to 19 years (M_age= 17.20, SD = 1.39) were selected from various public and private sector schools of Sargodha city. The study measures include Urdu versions of Parental Phubbing Scale (PPS) and the Smartphone Addiction Scale–Short Version (SAS-SV). The descriptive statistics, Pearson Product-moment Correlation and moderation analysis were performed by using PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013). The findings indicated that parental phubbing was a positive predictor of smartphone addiction among adolescents. The regression model accounted for 10.5 % variance in smartphone addiction (R₂= 0.10). Gender was found to have a main effect on smartphone addiction (β= -12.09***, p= 0.001). Moreover, the interaction between parental pubbing and gender was statistically significant (β= 0.53***, p= 0.001), indicating that gender moderates the relationship between parental phubbing and adolescents’ smartphone addiction. Explicitly, the positive association between perceived parental phubbing and smartphone addiction was stronger among female adolescents than among male adolescents, suggesting that girls may be more vulnerable to increased smartphone addiction when experiencing higher levels of perceived parental phubbing.