Smartphone Addiction Assessment Scale

Two qualified psychiatrists, Lin and Chang, experienced in substance-related disorder and Internet addiction, modified the 26-item Chen Internet Addiction Scale (CIAS) for “smartphone addiction” assessment. The psychometric study of the modified version of CIAS was conducted by Lin with the permission of Chen, in which five subscales were identified by exploratory factor analysis [5] . The term ‘‘Internet’’ was changed to ‘‘smartphone’’. The Mandarin Chinese version of the measure was finalized by an expert panel. The final revisions included the following: (1) Item 4 and 6 were replaced by the semantically similar item 2 and 3 of the 12-item Problematic Cellular Phone Use Questionnaire [10] (link), because the original item could not make sense by simply using “smartphone use” to substitute “Internet use”(2). Due to the uniqueness of smartphone use, item 21, i.e., “viewing smartphone when crossing the street; fumbling with one's smartphone while driving or waiting, and resulted in danger” was added at the end of the scale(3). For item 23, sentence was modified from original “I make it a habit to sleep less so that more time online.” as “I make it a habit to use smartphone and the sleep quality and total sleep time decreased.” (4) For item 25, sentence was modified from original “I fail to eat meals at the usual time because I am using the Internet” The revisions (3) and (4) were according to the characteristic of portability of smartphone distinguished from the “traditional” Internet use via computer. Participants were asked to rate items on a 4-point Likert scale, 1 =  strongly disagree”, 2 = “somewhat disagree”, 3 = “somewhat agree” and 4 = “strongly agree, so that the SPAI total score ranges from 26 to 104.