Design and validation of a scale to measure nomophobia among children 9-13 years old

Objective: To design and validate a nomophobia scale in children aged 9-13 years.Design: Cross-sectional descriptive observational study.Site: The pilot study was carried out in December 2019 with students from a school in Avila and another in Madrid. The field study was carried out during the months of January to March 2020, collecting data from 592 students from a school in Badajoz and 3 from Avila. Participants: Students of both sexes from 4th, 5th and 6th of Primary Education and from 1st and 2nd of Compulsory Secondary Education, from public and private schools.Method: The study has been divided in 2 phases. Phase I: consisted of the preparation of a 40-item questionnaire with the advice of a panel of experts. This questionnaire was passed, within the pilot study, to 312 children enrolled in Primary Education or Compulsory Secondary Education. After analyzing the results, the 40-item scale was modified to improve the unders-tanding of the schoolchildren and a field study was carried out with 592 participants. Phase II: consisted of an exploratory factorial analysis carried out using the principal components method, which provided the distribution of the items in 7 components. After the confirmatory factorial analysis, the final 32-item scale was defined.Results: This scale was shown to produce valid and reliable scores. Conclusions: The validation of this scale will be useful to identify children at risk of nomophobia, allowing educators, parents and health professionals to detect this phenomenon early in order to prevent pathological smartphone use.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).