Parents and governmental agencies must pay greater attention to the emergence of disturbing trends in the use of smartphones by young people, the Child Welfare League Foundation said.
The foundation made the appeal based on the results of a survey it conducted from May 16 to June 14 among fifth to eighth -grade students, which point to the growing prevalence of smartphone addiction.
The survey, released on Monday, found that 39 percent of respondents had smartphones, up from close to 20 percent in the foundation’s previous survey in 2011. The poll also found that those who had smartphones were using them longer and more often.
Photo: CNN, courtesy of the Child Welfare League Foundation
Among the respondents who own one of the devices, 13.9 percent said they use it for more than three hours a day on weekdays and 19 percent said they use it for more than 5 hours a day on weekends.
The most common activities to do on a smartphone: listening to music (85 percent), playing games (78 percent), using Facebook (68.6 percent) and chatting with friends on instant messaging applications like Line, WeChat and Whatsapp (64.6 percent), the survey found.
The poll found that 77.6 percent of respondents had downloaded and used apps on their phones.
The foundation said the survey revealed three worrying trends: the rise in the penetration of smartphones among young people, the increasing length of time young people use the gadgets and the growing rate of app downloads.
These trends, in turn, signal three potential crises, the foundation said.
The first is the rising addiction to the devices, with 36 percent of respondents saying they would feel unhappy, anxious or angry if they could not use their phone, and 19.8 percent reporting that they had fought with their parents because of restrictions to phone use.
Young smartphone users are also more exposed to the risks of befriending strangers on social networking sites, the foundation said, citing the 32 percent of respondents who said they added strangers to their circle of friends while using apps and the 23 percent who had met their new friends in person.
Another potential crisis was that most of the young smartphone users — 63 percent — were not familiar with the grading system for apps and could be downloading inappropriate or malicious content, the foundation said.
The survey received 2,483 valid samples and the margin of error was plus or minus-2 percentage points.
COSTLY TECH FAILURE: More than 25,000 files for nearly 8,000 students from 81 schools were lost when system administrators updated a server, the Ministry of Education said The academic records of 7,854 high-school students have been lost due to a hard-drive failure, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The records were being stored at National Chi Nan University, which was commissioned by the ministry’s K-12 Education Administration to host a computer server of student portfolios that universities could access to evaluate their applications. Under a program introduced in 2019 for high-school students starting that year, students are to create portfolios to be used for university applications, which include their grades, extracurricular activities and other information related to their character and achievements. System administrators discovered that files were missing when rebooting
921 EARTHQUAKE: The magnitude 7.3 quake left 2,456 people dead and 10,718 injured, while 53,661 houses were fully destroyed and 53,024 houses damaged The Central Weather Bureau yesterday received about 50,000 views on Facebook after it posted the data that it collected on Sept. 21, 1999, when the nation was devastated by a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. The data showed that the 921 Earthquake hit the nation at 1:47am, with the epicenter being 7km southwest of the bureau’s quake detection center in Nantou County’s Yuchi Township (魚池) at a depth of 8km. The quake left 2,456 people dead and 10,718 injured, while 53,661 houses were fully destroyed and 53,024 houses damaged, with the cost of the damage estimated at NT$300 billion (US$10.8 billion at the current
CONFUSING RESULTS: A New Taipei City worker tested positive for COVID-19 in a rapid test and a PCR test, but negative in a traditional nucleic acid test, the CECC said Travelers from Bangladesh, Brazil and Peru are no longer required to quarantine at a government center, and from Saturday can choose to quarantine at hotels, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The three nations are no longer considered “key high-risk countries,” as their COVID-19 case numbers have continued to fall, the CECC said, adding that no travelers from these countries have been confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 in the past two months. The revised classification would allow travelers from the three countries to choose where they stay during their mandatory 14-day quarantine, although they would be required to pay
‘TECHNICALITY’: The full moon was at 7:55am, but the Taipei Astronomical Museum said it technically remained a ‘real’ full moon when it rose again at night The Mid-Autumn Festival had a “real” full moon, the first time the astronomical categorization has fallen on the day of the festival since 2013, the Taipei Astronomical Museum said yesterday. The festival, which falls on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar — which this year was yesterday — does not always coincide with an exact full moon, the museum said. A full moon occurs when the Earth is between the sun and the moon — or, more precisely, when the ecliptic longitudes of the sun and the moon differ by 180° — which has a cycle of
RSS