pokie in your pocket?
ON A CRISP MORNING the winter before last in the Gothic university town of Heidelberg, which nestles in a valley of the Odenwald mountains in central Germany, a flyer appeared on the local campus. It seemed nothing out of the ordinary: just the image of an attractive woman above a page of blurb. Only a neat trick of Photoshop gave a clue to the poster’s intent. A smartphone, tilted sideways, was positioned over the woman’s head, its screen revealing a stylised image of her exposed brain. This ad for a study on smartphone use invited people to come forward if they thought they’d been spending a bit too much time on their device, especially if that behaviour had been called out by family or friends.
The study was no big deal. Its prime mover, Christian Wolf, a psychiatrist at the Heidelberg University Hospital, couldn’t even get funding for it, and he was resigned to conducting a small pilot. Universities the world over are plastered with these kinds of study entreaties; many barely get a passing glance from students or staff, who are – understandably – quickly inured to the novelty or modest financial rewards on offer. This one, however, took its designers by surprise.
“The overall response of recruitment was pretty overwhelming,” says Wolf. Within days the psychiatrist and his team were inundated with inquiries to take part, but were hamstrung by the lack of funding. “There was very high interest in the study, and we couldn’t increase the sample size,” he says. “People were disappointed because they couldn’t participate.”
What did so many people want a piece of? Wolf was going to do two things. First, he would give participants a series of questions to see whether their phone use really was getting out of hand. Had they missed work or school because of the phone? Were they constantly checking it in case they’d miss chats on social media? Was it on their mind even when they weren’t using it? And if daily life was getting out of whack, would they still refuse to give it up?
Wolf set the study in motion and his research team diligently ran subjects through the questionnaire. When it was done and dusted, they had identified 22 souls with an
