The Effects of Cell Phone use Among Teenagers and College Students.
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A cell phone is a gadget which enables its client to make and get phone calls to and from the general population phone arrange which incorporates other cell phones and settled line telephones all around the globe. The utilization of mobile phones has drastically turned into another period of comfort for millions of individuals around the world. Young people are the lion's share of versatile clients on the planet. Cell phones have turned out to be one crucial piece of an adolescent's life. The use of cell phones has re-formed, re-sorted out and changed a few social aspects of life (Ravidchandran, S. V., (2009)).
When concentrating on youngsters' cell phone utilization, writing has given proof to both positive and negative impacts of cell phone on adolescents. In this cutting-edge world, a cell phone furnishes a youngster with every one of its needs. Dependence on mobile phones - particularly among people in the age gathering of 13-18, is ending up increasingly self-evident, and the way that half of the American adolescents consider 'PDAs' as the way to their social life says a lot about the same.
While the individuals who legitimize the mounting pattern of mobile phone use among young people contend that it makes life significantly more straightforward and safe, pundits are of the feeling that the same is inflicting significant damage on their sprouting minds. One can't scrutinize the cruel position that the pundits have taken, as the lengthy rundown of sick impacts of wireless use on adolescents begins from negligible bother caused by unwanted messages to grave issues, for example, stalking in a type of sexting and explicit entertainment.
Despite the fact that the negative impacts of mobile phone use on adolescents have turned out to be one of the sultriest points for a look into investigations, with learn about it being doled out in handfuls consistently, there do exist some constructive outcomes of a similar which we can't bear to disregard. We can just go to an ordinary comprehension on whether the utilization of mobile phones at youthful age legitimized or not in the wake of assessing the advantages and disadvantages of this training.
Cell phone usage has continued to rise over time, and will only continue to do so. Excessive cell phone usage results in car accidents, poor academic performance, addictive qualities, cyberbullying, and sleep problems. While anyone can experience these problems, the paper has specialized on how cell phones affect teenagers and college students. Ultimately, it is important to be informed about this information because it creates a sense of awareness in order to help stop the addictive behavior that cell phones cause.
Cell phone usage causes distraction. Since the brain was not designed for multitasking without attention loss, the distraction of cell phone use in a vehicle results in more accidents. Cite? In society today, everywhere one looks, it is not uncommon to find majority of people in any location, glued to their cell phone. This is a problem for multiple reasons, but the most problematic issue is texting and driving. On Sunday January 23rd, 2017, a law went into effect that no longer allowed Washington State drivers to hold their cell phones while driving.
This law includes no texting, no holding the phone for GPS, no social media use, and no holding the phone for calls or dialing the phone. Seo and Torabi (2004) revealed that a survey that was taken in 2003 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that “85% of cell phone owners use their telephones at least occasionally while driving” (101). Additionally, Seo and Torabi (2004) noted that of the 6.3 million car crashes each year, 25% of them were related to distracted driving.
In regards to college students, drivers that are twenty-four years and younger make up 13.6% of the total amount of licensed drivers. Why this is so crucial to know is because that 13.6% are involved in 25.9% of total fatal crashes (102). In another study led by Seo and Torabi (2004), they were able to gather college students from two Midwestern states and two Southern states. The purpose of their experiment was to compare handheld cell-phone usage and accidents “that had happened or that had nearly happened” (102).
When the results came back, Seo and Torabi (2004) were able to identify that of the 1,291 students that participated in this experiment, 87% (1,030 students) said that they had a cell phone, and 86% (889 students) admitted that they used their cell-phone while operating their vehicle. In another survey conducted by Christopher P. Terry, and Danielle D. Terry (2015) they were able to accumulate 385 college students in order to have them take an online survey about “cell phone use and multitasking behavior” (668). The results came back showing that “Of the 385 licensed drivers included in the sample all of whom owned a cell phone, 91% reported engaging in using their cell-phone while driving, 63% reported experiencing one or more near accidents related to cell phone use while driving, and 3.4% reported experiencing one or more actual traffic accidents related to cell-phone use and driving” (671).
These sources correlate with one another because both distinctly break down the serious consequences of using a cell phone while driving. Far less dangerous, but still important, is the impact of cell phone use on academic performance.
Cell phone usage in classroom settings has only continued to grow throughout the years. In an article titled “Classroom texting in college students” Terry F. Pettijohn, Erik Frazier, Elizabeth Rieser, Nicholas Vaughn, and Bobbi Hupp-Wilds (2015) discuss not only how distracting cell phone use can be, but how it results in poor academics. The ability to resist using one’s cell phone resulted in higher attention levels, and better grades. They referred to a study by Wei, Wang, and Klausner (2013) which reported that students with a high level of self-regulation were less likely to text during class, and therefore had higher attention levels, resulting in better academic performance”.
When it came to texting in class, phones seemed even harder to resist. Pettijohn, Frazier, Rieser, Vaughn, and Hupp-Wilds (2015) decided to have 235 college students participate in an online, 21 question survey regarding their daily cell phone use. From those results, they discovered that only one student did not have a phone, 1 to 50 texts were sent by 36.9% of the students, 51 to 75 texts were sent by 13.3% of the students, 20.6% sent between 76 and 100 texts a day, 20.2% sent 100 to 300 texts per day and finally, 6.8% of the students admitted to sending over 300 texts a day.
Additionally, Lepp, Barkley, and Karpinski (2014) were also able to prove that excessive use of mobile phones resulted in many problems like poor academic performance. The number one academic-related problem that is being caused by excessive cell phone use is grade point average. In a study conducted by Brittany T. Harman and Toru Sato (2011), they were able to find out that people ages 14-18 send about 1,630 text messages a month. Pew Internet (2010) suggested that “in spite of the fact that many schools prohibit the use of cell phones, 65% of students who attend schools that ban cell phones still bring them every day and 43% of students reported that they text message in class at least once per day”.
Additionally, Christian M. End, Shaye Worthman, Mary Bridget Mathews, and Katharina Wetterau asked college students to participate in a study where they were asked to take notes on a video, and then take a test afterwards. One group of students was a part of “the ringing condition” where multiple cell phone rings would occur during the video. The second group of students was a control group where they were not disrupted by cell phone rings. One would imagine, the students that were in “the ringing condition” group did much worse on the test. Due to this unfortunate urge of constantly needing one’s cell phone on, and next to you is most commonly known as an addiction.
Many people cannot go a couple of minutes without checking their phones. The reason for this is the addictive qualities. During a study that took place during 2015, Maryam Siddiqui and Amena Zehra Ali (2015) discovered “The relationship between impulsiveness and behavioral addiction”. The most common reason that people are addicted to their cell phones is because of the dopamine that is releases. In addition to the behavioral addiction, there is also physical side effect that may not always be seen.
For example, Ali and Siddiqui (2015) came up with six main ways to be able to identify whether or not someone may deal with this addiction. The “symptoms” are as follows: Salience, euphoria, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflict, and relapse and reinstatement. Many people don’t know this, but there is a medical term known as nomophobia which is defined as “fear of being without access to a working cell phone” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. A survey that was done by a fellow colleague revealed some mind-boggling statistics that intertwine with the “symptoms” of nomophobia. In this study of 10,191 adolescents, “30% (3,057) of participants exhibited tolerance, 36% (3,669) suffered withdrawal, 27% (2,752) exhibited loss of control, 18% (1,834) experienced relapse, and 10% (1,019) had conflict owing to excessive cell phone usage” (Brown, 1993/1997).
In addition to Brown’s study, Jessica Stillman did a study particularly on couples and how cell phone use has affected couples communication skills. In 2006 it was also reported that excessive cell phone use resulted in financial problems. Similarly, addictive cell phone qualities can be linked with anxiety and depression.
Multiple research studies have shown that excessive cell phone use has been known to cause anxiety and depression. An article written by Andrew Lepp, Andrew Barkley, and Aryn C. Karpinski disclosed that when they asked a young female if she had anxiety when using her cell-phone, this was her response. “The social network sometimes just makes me feel a little bit tied to my phone. It makes me feel like I have another obligation in my life that I have to stick to. Sometimes the cell-phone use just makes me feel like it is a whole new world of obligations that I have because anyone can get ahold of me at any time by just thinking about me.
You know, if my mom wanted to give me a call right now, and just talk for a second, she could. And if I did not call her back by the end of the day, she would get worried. It creates a bit of anxiety and it is kind of annoying sometime” (343). It is important to keep in mind that this response was coming from a “high-frequency user”.
Sleep is very important to begin with, but the amount of sleep that teenagers are getting each night is rapidly deteriorating. In an article titled “The association of sleep and late-night cell phone use among adolescents” by Babak Amra, Ali Shahsavari, Ramin Shayan-Moghadam, Omid Mirheli, Bita Moradi-Khaniabadi, Mehdi Bazukar, Ashkan Yadollahi-Farsani, and Roya Kelishadi, a study showed that cell-phone use late at night resulted in day time sleepiness, insomnia, and a short sleeping period in Japanese adolescents. Additionally, a sleep survey was performed on 2,257 adolescents. During the survey it showed that when using “The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index questionnaire” 1,270 of the volunteers used their cell phones past 9 o’clock at night. Cell phone users past 9 o’clock woke up at approximately 8:17 am, compared to non-users that woke up at 8:03 am.
Similarly, Nila Nathan, and Jaime Zeitzer (2013) were also able to identify that using a cell phone late at night resulted in “short sleep duration, subjective poor sleep quality, excessive daytime sleepiness, and insomnia symptoms” (1). After getting ready for bed, some have a bad habit of going through their phones for an hour or two. Some of these individuals are not the kind of people to stay up late to begin with, but they know if they were to check their phones earlier in the night, then it would most likely result in mthem being able to fall asleep quicker. Another bad habit of some college students is that although they may put their phones down for the night, they will pick it back up again if they hear it vibrate and then they will respond to whoever snapchatted, or texted them.
This then results in most of them checking social media all over again, and ends up causing most teenagers to have a hard time falling asleep. Authors, Anna Shoeni, Katharina Roser, and Martin Roosli (2015) were able to perform a study on 439 students that ranged in age from 12 years old to 17 years old. They went to 23 schools and had the students fill out a survey. In this survey, they were asked whether or not they would turn off their phone at night, and if their cell phone or someone else’s would cause them to wake up during the night.
In regards to the people that said that they did get woken up in the middle of the night due to a phone call or text message, they were then asked if they answered the phone call or whether or not they answered the text message. By these questions being asked, the researchers were able to correlate daytime sleepiness and headaches with the student’s behavior the previous night. Finally, it is important to mention that cell phone usage, and poor sleep quality has been linked with childhood obesity. During a study by Nomathemba Dube, Kaviul Khan, Sarah Loehr, Yen Chu, and Paul Veugelers, they chose to survey 2,334 students in order to find out whether cell phone use really linked with obesity.
For one night, the children’s parents would log their bed time, and wake up time, how often they snored, and if they had daytime sleepiness. When given access to cell phones and hour or two before bed, it resulted in 10.8 minutes less of sleep. “Odds of obesity were doubled when a child was allowed access to a cell phone in their bedroom”. It is really important to limit the amount of electronic access that you allow children because as time goes on, dependency and addiction rates in cell phones are only continuing to rise. In addition to cell phones affecting sleep, they are also affecting daily jobs.
Cell phones have not only caused stress, poor academic performance, and distracted driving, but it has also caused a major amount of cyberbullying issues. Majority of teenagers and college students in particular rely on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat for their daily entertainment. On these social media platforms it is quite often that people will say things as a “joke” but often enough, kids do not take the words that people say as jokes. Not only does bullying result in anxiety, and depression, it results in suicide.
Ybara and Mitchell (2004) discovered that cyberbullying also has the effects of poor academics, but it also increases the chances of alcohol consumption and smoking. Finn (2004) conducted a study on 339 New Hampshire university students. What was revealed in the study was that 10% to 15% experienced multiple instant message, and email threats. This resulted in university students becoming depressed and anxious. Authors Shari Kessel Schneider, Lydia O’ Donnell, Ann Stueve, and Robert W. S. Coulter (2012), explained the significant problem of cyber bullying and how it is resulting in a large amount of suicides among teenagers. In school systems, they make it seem as though cyber bullying is not tolerated. When in reality, the unfortunate news is that they don’t do much about it.
At my school, two students (one freshman, and one senior) killed themselves due to being cyber bullied. All the school did about it was put together an assembly, and hired extra counselors for anyone who felt they needed to see one. What really made a lot of people curious was what the school did about the cyberbullies. Where they suspended from school? Did they have to apologize to the teenager’s parents for bullying their child so much that it resulted in him taking his own life? Additionally, at some schools there are forms called harassment/intimidation/bullying (HIB). As a person who has had to fill one of those out before, nothing was resolved from it.
As much there is a lot of adverse effects of phone use especially among the college students and teens, there are also positive effects of it. The right side of it has been narrowed down specifically to school and class work, or overall education purposes.
Mobile phones can be an intense interest apparatus in the classroom. For example, the site stage Poll Everywhere enables instructors to make survey questions. Understudies react by messaging their reaction to a number, and after that live outcomes can right away be explored by the classroom. Along these lines, an instructor can rapidly decide the general comprehension of a theme and change their lesson design appropriately.
Another way PDAs can support investment in the classroom is by welcoming understudies to utilize content informing or Twitter to make inquiries to the educator all through the lesson. Educators permitting this method of investment can empower understudies who are more hesitant or modest to make the questions, and additionally to guarantee that significant inquiries don't go missed or overlooked
PDAs can fill in as a device for snappy reference in the classroom. With regards to double checking spelling, word definitions, or even to look into elective word decisions, applications like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary App and the Webster's Thesaurus App are quick and straightforward to-utilize assets. For understudies examining remote dialects, there are numerous valuable outside word reference applications accessible for nothing, and also applications, for example, the Conjugate Spanish Verbs application that can help understudies on the off chance that they are uncertain of the correct method to conjugate a specific verb.
Furthermore, having the capacity to look into news articles online using a mobile phone is a decent route for understudies to have the ability to counsel and add to meaningful classroom dialog. News-O-Matic is an application that spreads significant news of the day through pictures, maps, recordings, and amusements, and kids journalists compose all articles.
Finally, phones can enable understudies to remain sorted out and over assignments, homework, tasks, and due dates. For instance, myHomework App is a cross-stage application that understudies can access on any gadget that offers a helpful and instinctive other option to the customary paper organizer. Understudies will get warning indications of up and come due dates, and they can without much of stretch info new assignments and out of this world up.
As far as keeping notes sorted out, Evernote is an advantageous application that understudies can use to decipher and get to their records crosswise over gadgets. Understudies can without much of a stretch sort up their notes when they learn at home, and after that entrance them in class on their phone by utilizing the application. If an educator uses the Evernote application, they can take photos of their overhead or whiteboard notes and efficiently share them with understudies who are additionally utilizing the form. This apparatus can likewise prove to be useful for understudies who, for whatever individual reason, must miss a broadened time of class instructors can stay up with the latest on classroom notes!
Wherever you remain on the phone in the classroom banter, there's no denying that every year cell phones are winding up increasingly coordinated into each aspect of our day by day lives and that instructors will keep on integrating them, in some minor shape, into their lesson designs and educating styles.
Numerous understudies utilize their mobile phones to record assignments and sort out their days or ends of the week; this is exceptionally useful in an instructive setting. The upside to having your organizer on your telephone is that you have your telephone, though we have all observed individuals overlook their organizers.
It appears like such a basic simple and compelling device you can use on your phone, however, if instructors don't give you a chance to have them out then how are you ready to utilize such a great asset? An investigation by researchers in Georgia demonstrated that the impact of using wireless as an asset in the classroom and turns out with a positive outcome. Individuals who were permitted to utilize their telephones as an organizer will probably record it and finish it than somebody else.
Messaging an inquiry to an educator since you're humiliated to raise your hand and stop the stream of the class may destine to be the future in classrooms. In a trial in Europe at the University of Hertfordshire, London, UK, individuals could message in an inquiry they had about the address onto the class PC, at that point it would streak on the screen. Entirely unknown, the understudy feels less "inept" yet at the same time can have an inquiry replied.
At last, PDAs are an extraordinary asset in the classroom. There are numerous useful research applications, for example, the word references and interpreters. Additionally, you can without much of a stretch look into an unverifiable actuality by Googling it on a cell phone. With the word reference application, a convenient lexicon is accessible, comfortable fingertips and would enhance the spelling of transcribed archives. The interpreter application makes it simple for understudies to look into words in changed dialects, and with a few apps, hear the word so anyone might listen. If everybody with a cell phone had the word reference or interpreter application, there would be no compelling reason to buy a class set of lexicons.
Numerous individuals may contend that the utilization of telephones in a classroom is diverting and reduced use of assets. We as a whole hear, "back in my day we didn't have phones" once in a while from a grown-up, however in all actuality, it's not in those days; it's presently. This rising innovation is enhancing our lifestyle and making a more gainful approach to learn.
Association would be simple and more assignments would be handed over and on time; befuddled understudies would at long last have the capacity to make their inquiries easily and look into applications would enhance data access and understudy craftsmanship. We could utilize telephones to improve our training. These cell phones are called keen which is as it should be.
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