Texting and talking off the chain is accepted as normal behavior for kids these days, that’s for sure. Everyone’s gotta communicate, right? But what if all that nonstop chatting served as an indicator for something deeper down in the human psyche? Well, a 2006 South Korean study conducted on 575 high school students explains that it just might. Depression, Watson! Dr. Jee Hyan Ha believes that today’s astronomical teen cell phone usage does in fact signal degrees of depression amongst the demographic.
Students in the study were asked to indicate the number of times they used their phone daily, as well as take a standardized evaluation to measure depression. Results revealed that students who whipped out their cellular phone 90 times per day were significantly more depressed than those who only used their phone 70 times throughout their waking hours. On a scale, 21 and over suggesting clinical depression, the “major” users received average results around 12 while the lower talkers saw 7s in general. Yikes!
We can take these results to heart, meaning that young adults, whose lives hinge on communication with peers, look to their phones for happiness and affiliation on a daily basis. Or we can question the means and methods of the experiment.
Problems with research methods, or at least with reports on the methods, definitely arise as far as I’m concerned. First, as Americans, can South Korean data possess any relevance to our nation’s youth at all? Pardon my villainy, but Korea has had a history of questionable communication addiction. Youth in that county have been exposed, at least in the media, as chronic addicts. I recall tales of videogame marathon-induced death. Most likely, as called attention to in the article itself, real depression would be marked by nonexistent usage of the device. Total disconnection from society is a known signaler of depression.
Second, what exactly does “phone usage” entail? If not specified on the questionnaire, the teens might have included times when they merely looked at the phone to get the time.
And finally, if twenty texts is the difference between being depressed and being happy, then I’m not so sure the standardized depression test is exactly reliable. After all, who in the world could notice such a difference in phone usage? Cell phone usage, at least for me, shifts every day. I may use it for texts or calls ten times a day, or I may use it sixty. With such variations, how could there even exist a stable link between usage and depression? Also, it could be possible that an unseen, underlying factor is the true menace. Say a biological disposition for apathy: it could account for both boredom-enhanced mobile usage and depression.
Anyhow, the research shown definitely has a few noticeable kinks and flaws, but I do feel like it holds a sizable amount of agua.
