A 10-question check on your phone use
These ten statements are the Smartphone Addiction Scale – Short Version, published by researchers in 2013 and used in studies since, including in India. Answer each from 1 to 6. Your score is worked out on your phone: nothing is stored, nothing is sent, and there is no email field between you and the result.
It is a screening questionnaire: a way of putting numbers on how your phone use feels to you. It is not a diagnosis, and it cannot be one — there is no clinical category for smartphone use to diagnose. If you are worried about yourself or someone else, the services on this page are staffed by people who can actually assess it, several of them free.
0 of 10 answered. Your score appears here once every statement has an answer. Nothing you pick is stored or sent anywhere.
What the numbers mean, and whose numbers they are
The scale runs from 10 to 60. Its authors tested it on 540 Korean adolescents with an average age of 14.5 and reported a cut-off of 31 for boys (sensitivity 0.867, specificity 0.893) and 33 for girls (0.875, 0.886). A 2025 validation in Industrial Psychiatry Journal, of 434 Indian adults aged 18 to 30, treated a score of 36 or more as high problematic use.
Three different numbers, because they come from three different groups of people — and none of those groups is you. That is the honest limit of any questionnaire: it tells you how closely your answers resemble those of a particular sample, which is information, not a verdict. A 34 does not make you ill and a 22 does not prove you are fine.
What the score is genuinely useful for is comparison with yourself. Answer it again in a month, after changing something about where your phone lives in the evening, and the direction of travel means more than either number on its own.
What tends to actually help
Most of the items above describe reaching for a phone before deciding to — checking it, missing things, using it longer than intended. That is not a willpower deficit to be corrected by trying harder; it is what a device designed to be reachable in one second does to anybody. The fix that works is making the reach cost something.
- Change the distance, not the intention. Why app blockers stop working is the long version: an off switch that lives on the tempting device gets used.
- See the hours as a total. The screen time calculator turns your daily average into days a year, and into the hours before a date you choose.
- If it is more than a habit, ask someone qualified. Tele-MANAS, NIMHANS and D-DAD — free, and none of them sell anything.
The scale, and its licence
The ten statements and their six response labels are reproduced verbatim from Appendix S1 of:
Kwon M, Kim D-J, Cho H, Yang S (2013). “The Smartphone Addiction Scale: Development and Validation of a Short Version for Adolescents.” PLOS ONE 8(12): e83558. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083558
That article is open-access under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, which permits reproduction provided the authors and source are credited — which is what this section is for. The wording of the items has not been altered.
The Indian reference point is Felix G, Sharma MK et al. (2025), Industrial Psychiatry Journal 34(1):53–60, doi.org/10.4103/ipj.ipj_336_24. Spark has no connection to either set of authors, and neither endorses this site.
Make the undo cost a walk.
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