earticle

영어

Despite growing concerns about smartphone addiction, our understanding of this issue remains limited. The purpose of this study is to explore the social understanding of smartphone addiction. In particular, we expect that there is an understanding gap between digital natives (DN) and digital immigrants (DI) regarding smartphone addiction. For the research objective, transcripts from in-depth interviews of 85 participants were analyzed and were boiled down 24 key topics by content analysis. In the next stage, the topics were classified into central and peripheral factors by core and periphery analysis. Finally, to compare DN and DI with different understandings of smartphone addiction, we illustrate the maximum tree, which visualizes social representations. The findings indicate that while DN perceive the phenomenon of smartphone addiction in the position of an actor; DI understand it from the observer’s perspective. This exploratory study contributes to provide fundamental knowledge about smartphone addiction for future research by initially investigating users’ understandings of smartphone addiction.