The Relationship between Stress and Smartphone Addiction among Adolescents: The Mediating Effect of Grit

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of grit on the relationship between stress and smartphone addiction among adolescents. Participants were 605 Korean students from age 12 to 16 (mean age = 13.97 years). Stress was assessed using the Daily Hassles Scales for Children in Korea developed by Han and Yoo (1995). Grit was measured by the Korean translated version of the Original Grit Scale (Duckworth et al., 2007; Park et al., 2020), and smartphone addiction was measured by using the Smartphone Addiction Proneness Scale for Youth developed by the National Information Society Agency (2011). The mediating effect was analyzed by using PROCESS macro version 3.5, and bootstrapping was conducted to test the significance of the mediating effect. The results showed that adolescent's stress and grit significantly influenced smartphone addiction. Also, grit partially mediated the relationship between stress and smartphone addiction. This means that high levels of stress reduced grit, which in turn increased smartphone addiction proneness among adolescents. In addition, two factors of grit (consistency of interest and perseverance of effort) both mediated the association between stress and smartphone addiction. The current study is meaningful in that it is the first study to empirically investigate adolescent's grit in relation to stress and smartphone addiction. Moreover, this study can provide useful information about prevention and intervention strategies for smartphone addiction.