Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 30, 2019
Date Accepted: Dec 16, 2019
An exploratory factor analysis of the Chinese version of the nomophobia questionnaire among college students
ABSTRACT
Background:
Nomophobia is a newly emerging psychiatric disorder among mobile phone users, especially when they are out of contact with a smartphone or mobile phone.
Objective:
There are no psychometric scales available in China for examining nomophobia, although it has become the largest smartphone handset consumer worldwide. Hence, the present study was performed to translate the original English version of this construct into Chinese, and further, examine its reliability among Chinese college age students.
Methods:
The original version of this questionnaire was first transformed into Chinese using “backwards and forwards” translation procedure. An exploratory factor analysis (A principal component analysis plus varimax rotaion) was performed to examine the underlying factor structure of the translated questionnaire. The internal consistency reliability of the scale was determined by computing the Cronbach alpha coefficient and the corrected item-toal correlation. Multivariate regression analysis was used for seeking associations between nomophobia and independent variables among the college students.
Results:
A total of 2,000 participants were included in the study. Their age ranged from 16 to 25 years, with 51.9% participants being males. The eigenvalues, total variance explained, and scree plot jointly support a four-factor structure of the translated queationnaire. Cronbach alpha coefficient of this scale was 0. 934, and those of the subscales were 0.818, 0.843, 0.907, and 0.907, respectively. Corrected item-total correlation ranged from 0.544 to 0.716. Average daily hours spent on a smartphone use and gender were significant predictors for each of the dimensions of nomophobia and the total score of the questionnaire.
Conclusions:
The Chinese version of the nomophobia questionnaire exhibited satisfactory psychometric properties.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
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