Prevalence of Nomophobia in students due to COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan (Preprint)

BACKGROUND COVID-19 Lockdown has limited the non-essential movement of people. Consequently, the effects of lockdown had a remarkable impact on everyday life, including health, social sector, economic decline, supply chain sectors and education sector. Just because the social distancing is in ascend, people are looking up new ways to connect and Smart Phones are the most convenient, accessible, and cost-effective way to stay connected during this pandemic. People have become significantly dependent on their smart phones during COVID-19 pandemic that allow to work from home and stay connected with the world. Smartphone addiction is known as nomophobia (NMP) which is a fear of not using smart phone. OBJECTIVE This nondrug addiction is as dangerous as drug addiction. It produces behavioral modifications in everyday habits and actions. Much research is available on nomophobia, to the best of author’s knowledge, there is no literature available on the prevalence of NMP during COVID-19 lockdown METHODS It was a descriptive cross-sectional study. Subjects fulfilling the selection criteria were enrolled in the study through public sector universities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Non- Probability convenient sampling technique was used to select 580 students of both genders from 18 to 24 years of age. 18 Students who were corona positive or having any known psychiatric disorder were excluded from the study. A cross sectional survey was conducted online by via Google form. Validated Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q) was utilized. A self-reported questionnaire regarding demographic data and information regarding use of smart phone. It is the most widely used measurement instrument, proposed by Yildrim and Correia, anyone can use it for noncommercial research and educational projects. NMP-Q includes 20 Likert scale items rated from 1 strongly disagree to 7 strongly agree. The lowest score on the NMP-Q is 20 and 140 is the highest. 20 represent absent of nomophobia, 21 – 59 mild level, 60 – 99 moderate level and 100 – 140 severe nomophobia. Google forms automatically analyzed the collected data. RESULTS A total of 580 subjects 290 (50%) were male and 290 (50%) were female. Mean age was 21 ± 2.3 years. Out of 580 subjects 460(79.31%) were nomophobic. Subject who had severe nomophobia were 19%, moderate nomophobia 58% and mild nomophobia 23%. Subject reported that they could not stay away from their smart phones and keep their phones with them even at bedtime. 226 (38.9%) subjects never turned their phone off. 253 (43.6%) subjects carry a power bank with them so they may not run out of battery. Out of 290 female students 199 (68.6%) were nomophobic and out of 290 male subjects 261 (90%) were nomophobic. So, nomophobia was more prevalent in male. Most frequent reason for using smart phone was social networking (WhatsApp, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, tiktok, snapchat) 91% and playing games 73%. CONCLUSIONS High prevalence of nomophobia was found. Due to COVID -19 lockdown students have straight off become dependent on smart phones that allow them to work and learn from home and take online classes. Smart phone is only source of entertainment for them so there is a huge percentage of a student having moderate nomophobia. So time of using smart phones should be regularized in order to avoid serious harmful effects due to prolong use.