The reciprocal relationship between mobile phone dependence and school adaptation in Korean adolescents: Autoregressive cross-lagged modeling

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reciprocal longitudinal effects between mobile phone dependence and school adaptation among Korean adolescents, controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. An autoregressive cross-lagged model was applied to a data set from a sample of 1659 adolescents from the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey conducted by the National Youth Policy Institute. We found that the positive autoregressive effects of mobile phone dependence and school adaptation were statistically significant over the study period. Results from the cross-lagged analyses demonstrated a unidirectional relationship between two variables: Superior school adaptation decreased mobile phone dependence, but mobile phone dependence did not affect school adaptation. Thus, we identified the causal direction and reciprocal relationship between mobile phone dependence and school adaptation. Girls were found to have a higher level of mobile phone dependence than boys did. Furthermore, the higher the household income, the better adolescents adapted to school. Child abuse and neglect played a role in increasing mobile phone dependence and negatively affected school adaptation.