Georgia Turner
As research relating time spent on one’s phone to mental health has yielded mixed results, we urgently need better ways to measure smartphone use. Here, we develop a network analysis method to identify the patterns by which people journey across Apps in a phone use session. We find that features of ‘App-journey’ networks relate to mental health. For example, users with higher depressive symptoms have App-journey networks with lower modularity and higher density – suggesting they journey more randomly across Apps. In contrast, time spent on one’s phone does not significantly relate to mental health. By focusing on transition patterns between smartphone activities, rather than the specific activities themselves, we uncover a novel, potentially clinically relevant variable to study digital wellbeing.