Scale for Measuring Phubbing in Peruvian University Students: Adaptation, Validation and Results of Its Application

Phubbing is defined as ignoring people with whom you have a face-to-face relationship to attend to smartphones. The phenomenon of phubbing particularly affects the teenage and young segments of the population. The main problem lies in the impact it has on individuals’ social relationship. A lack of validated instruments to diagnose this phenomenon has been observed amongst the Spanish-speaking youth. The objective pursued with this research was to analyse the structural validity and reliability of the Spanish scale in a sample of 454 Peruvian university students. A reliability study was carried out following Cronbach and McDonald, complemented with an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The results show good reliability and validity values. Finally, some aspects associated with users’ profiles in relation to the scale were discussed too. A need exists to have adapted instruments which permit to measure emerging social threats such as phubbing, so that risk profiles can be identified and for us to be able to act in time. Most of the students surveyed regularly engaged in phubbing, and a significant percentage of them had personal and social problems because of this, including lack of sleep hours or arguments with friends and relatives, to quote but two.