Focal analysis of the relationship between mobile addiction components and the rate of high-risk driving behaviors of young people

According to epidemiological and communicative studies, the use of mobile phones while driving has become one of the important factors in distracting drivers and increasing the number of accidents. The present study was conducted to identify the relation between the components of mobile addiction with the rate of high-risk driving behaviors among youth.

This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive correlation in terms of nature and method. This study included all students of Hamadan Azad University in the academic year 2020-2021, which according to the statistics were about 15,000 people. 384 people participated voluntarily and online through internet invitation due to traffic limitation during the Corona pandemic. Mobile phone addiction questionnaires and Iranian risk-taking questionnaire (high-risk driving component with 6 questions and 3 sub-components) were used to collect the required data. After confirming the content validity of the questionnaire used, cronbach's alpha was respectively 0.87 and 0.89. The research tools were designed on Press Line site and the link was shared in Whatsapp and Telegram groups to enable students who had driver's license for at least in past two years can participate in the study.
The Canonical correlation test and multiple regression in SPSS 23 software were used to analyze the data.

47% of the samples (181 people) were male and 53% (203 people)were female with a mean age of 25.41±8.04. The mean score of mobile addiction of the participants were 40.23 with a standard deviation of 11.38 and also the mean of high-risk behaviors was 93.05 with a standard deviation of 20.84. The results showed that Between the components of mobile addiction (inability to control desire, feeling anxious and lacking and improving mood) with the components of high-risk driving (high-risk driving, speeding, believing in control and breaking the rules) there was a positive and direct relationship (p<0.01) and with the knowledge of the focal variable of mobile addiction, 12.5% of the changes in high-risk driving were predictable. According to the focal loads in the formation of predictor variables, the highest share was related to the feeling of anxiety and deficiency (0.928) and in the criterion variable, the highest share was related to the tendency to speed (0.893).

Addictive use of mobile phones causes people to face risky behaviors. Therefore, when a person who is addicted to mobile phones will feel compelled to check it in different situations. These situations may be while driving and in places where the use of mobile phones is prohibited, which will be a kind of lawlessness and harmful consequences..