THE INTERNET VS. ONE'S WELL-BEING

Along with our in-person interview, we conducted a survey to get an understanding of people’s relationship with phone usage and their physical activity and well-being. Our survey received interaction with almost seventy people overall with the majority being female respondents and a large participation from those between the age range of 18 and 30 years old.

 

In Figure 1, respondents provided how many hours they spend on their phones daily. With this, we saw an average of three to five hours of phone usage for these participants with the lowest being thirty minutes and the highest being fifteen hours. We then asked the participants to analyze their phone usage concerning the primary purpose of their use, whether it was for work, school, or social media. The predominant answer for the primary purpose of phone usage was social media with school and work at a tie. The participants were then asked if they were concerned about the amount of time they spend on their phone and 43.5% answered yes with 37.7% saying no and the 18.8% at a maybe.

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The last two questions were centered around physical activity and one’s well-being. The first question asked the participants whether they believed their phone usage had an impact on the amount of physical activity they had and their personal well-being. In Figure 2, the graph shows that a little more than half of the respondents chose yes. The survey ended on asking the participants how many hours a day they spend being physically active and we were able to see an average of two to three hours.

 

Overall, our survey is only able to suggest a possible connection between phone usage and physical activity due to the information being self-reported as well as having a small sample group. Despite this, it does not take away the fact that this survey begins the topic of discussion of whether our phone usage can impact us in areas of well-being and the amount of physical activity we partake in. 

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    Our video results compared with our survey results differ in the amount of time someone spends on their phone. The age range that we had for the video compared to the survey is between the ages of 15 and 67. The average for the video was around 6 hours and up hours with 1 hour being the lowest someone spent on the phone. When it came to seeing for what reason the person used their phone, we got the most results from those interviewed saying that they used their phone for personal, school, and work reasons. With those categories split up, personal was the one with the highest response. For the following question on if the those interviewed were happy with the amount of time they spent on their phone, it was a close call. 46% said that they were happy with the amount of time spent on their phone while 54% said that they were not. When asked if they though there was a correlation between physical activity and phone usage, we had a variety of answers. The most prominent answer was that there was no correlation between the two subjects. Some of the responses varied from there being negative effects from phone usage, not getting enough sleep at night, and there being decrease in their physical activity. We did have some people say that they want to improve their exercise, increase their productivity, and just more active in general so we did have variation in responses. On our second to last question, we asked how many hours they spent being physically active. Our biggest section was being active from zero hours to 4 with a 68%, five through nine hour and ten hours and up being at a tie of 15% each. Last but not least, we asked how much they spent on their phones. Between one through four hours had a response of 65% while five house and up had a 24% response, and less than one hour had an 11% response. The responses we had on our video compared to the survey were similar with small variations but overall, we saw consistency.