What colour are you? Smartphone addiction traffic lights and user profiles

Abstract

Purpose: The key concern nowadays is smartphone addiction and user profiles. Following the risk and protective factors framework, the authors aim to characterize smartphone users according to two levels: (1) individual: referred to the use (i.e. boredom proneness, compulsive app downloading smartphone addiction) and (2) microsystem: referred to family and peers (i.e. family harmony and phubbing). Besides, the authors will derive useful managerial implications and strategies. Design/methodology/approach: First, an extensive literature revision and in-depth interviews with experts were employed to identify the addiction-related variables at the individual and microsystem level. Second, information was collected from a sample of 275 Spanish smartphone users, and a K-means clustering algorithm was employed to classify smartphone users. Findings: The proposed traffic lights schema identifies three users’ profiles (red, yellow and green) regarding their smartphone addiction and considering individual and microsystem critical variables. Originality/value: This study proposes a practical and pioneer traffic lights schema to classify smartphone users and facilitate each cluster's strategies development.