Relating smartphone ‘App-journeys’ to mental health: A novel network analysis approach

As debates over the impact of smartphones on young people intensify, we urgently need ways to identify which smartphone behaviours are related to poorer mental health. While many approaches focus on specific harmful or beneficial smartphone activities, here we instead suggest that the relationship between smartphones and mental health may partly depend on how users transition between activities. To test this, we develop a novel network analysis method to analyze objective smartphone data. We construct networks capturing how each user journeys across mobile Apps within a smartphone usage session, which we term ‘App-journey’ networks. Across a dataset of participants aged 18-22 (n = 82), exploratory statistical analyses show that features of ‘App-journey’ networks correlate with user mental health and attentional control. For example, users with higher depressive symptoms typically transition to a wider variety of Apps within each phone session (higher network density) and are less likely to confine each phone session to repeated groups of Apps (lower network modularity). Additionally, specific Apps which users report using more automatically are more central in App-journey networks than Apps users report using less automatically. In contrast to features of App-journey networks, time spent on one’s phone is not significantly related to mental health. In summary, this novel method to study smartphone use abstracts away from activities themselves and instead quantifies patterns of activity transitions. We show such transition patterns are related to user mental health and subjective experiences of automatic use, thus representing targets for future research and interventions.