Relevance & Research Question

While FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) is already well known as an important factor that leads to extensive smartphone use (ESU) and lowers wellbeing (WB), research starts to look at the new phenomenon Nomophobia (the fear of being separated from one’s smartphone and not being connected and reachable, e.g. Yildirim & Correia, 2015). However, it still remains unclear, how Nomophobia lowers wellbeing – social as well as psychological wellbeing – over and above the already known factors FoMO and ESU.

Methods & Data

This study (ad-hoc-sample: N=132) combines all factors in one design and investigates to what extend Nomophobia (measured by: NMP-Q-D Coenen & Görlich, 2022) is an additional factor that causes negative effects on wellbeing (measured by: FAHW, Wydra, 2020) over and above FoMO (measured by FoMO, Spitzer, 2015) as well as ESU (measured by: SAS-SV, Randler et al., 2016). Several regression analyses calculated the effect sizes for the main effects as well as the interaction effects for the different factors – controlled for age and gender.

Results

Interestingly, different effects can be found regarding psychological wellbeing compared to social wellbeing. Whereas ESU (beta=-.31, p<.01) but not nomophobia lowered the psychological wellbeing quite a lot, instead Nomophobia (beta=-.18, p<.10) but not ESU lowered the social wellbeing significantly. FoMO was similarly a negative factor for psychological (beta=-.22, p<.05) as well as social wellbeing (beta=-.21, p<.05). Interaction effects between all of these factors were tested but could not be found. All in all, quite a part of the variance can be explained only by these three factors: 16% of the variance of psychological wellbeing and 12% of the variance of social wellbeing.

Added Value

This study extends the knowledge about the factors that causes negative effects on the wellbeing of people in the digital age. Smartphones are so prominent and important nowadays that the fear of losing them can cause additional harm. The results show, that they serve as an important connection tool for social relationships, losing them creates stress and their exorbitant use lowers the wellbeing of people.

Relevance & Research Question

Online surveys offer the possibility of interviewing participants of a panel more frequently at reasonable costs. A higher contact frequency might thereby lead to a lower rate of unsuccessful contact attempts through increased bonding with the respondents and address maintenance. If life history data is collected, a higher survey frequency also offers the advantage of shorter reporting periods and decreased time lag for the retrospective collection of these data (Haunberger 2010). This should reduce recall errors and the cognitive burden for respondents. Nevertheless, more frequent interviews also increase the response burden or survey fatigue and could thus lead to a reduced willingness to participate (Haunberger 2010; Schnauber and Daschmann 2016; Stocké and Langfeldt 2003; Nederhof 1986). Until now there is insufficient empirical evidence for survey makers to decide on an optimal design when implementing online panel surveys (see most recently Zabel 1998 for very short wave intervals). Furthermore, existing evidence on survey frequency is limited to CATI and face to face interviews, constraining the validity of possible conclusions about online surveys. We are therefore analysing how the response rate changes when the survey frequency in an online survey is increased.

Methods & Data

To examine the effect of the survey frequency we implemented an experiment in a panel of secondary school graduates that surveys respondents every two years. To vary the survey frequency, an additional wave was conducted one year after the second wave for a random sample of participants. Both, control and treatment group, were interviewed again two years after the second wave. We compare response rates between these two groups in the latest wave.

Results

We find a minimally higher response rate with a biennial survey – but without statistical significance. Thus, with a higher expected data quality, no (significant) losses in terms of response seem to be expected if the survey frequency is increased from biennial to annual.

Added Value

Our results serve as a guideline for survey makers on how to implement online panel surveys aiming for the sweet spot between optimized contact strategies, response burden, and high quality online panel data.