Sahar Yousef
PLACEHOLDER
—
Lecturer
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
Digital Dependence Index
How is your phone shaping your life?
Take a short research assessment and get a plain-language readout of how your phone habits relate to attention, sleep, stress, and connection.
Takes about four minutes.
Welcome to the Digital Dependence Index.
The DDI is being developed to measure when ordinary phone use becomes harder to regulate. It focuses on patterns people recognize in daily life: checking without deciding to, using the phone to manage discomfort, staying on longer than intended, and losing sleep or in-person time.
The goal is not to tell people they are “addicted.” The goal is to give people a useful mirror, and to build better research on how digital habits connect to wellbeing.
Join future studies
Leave an email if you want to hear about future DDI studies or longitudinal follow-up. This is optional.
Digital dependence is not the same thing as using your phone a lot.
A phone can be useful, necessary, and enjoyable. Dependence begins to matter when use becomes harder to choose, harder to stop, or more likely to replace sleep, attention, work, or in-person connection.
What It Means
Three ingredients make ordinary use feel dependent.
Move the sliders to see the idea. Time matters, but time alone is a weak story. Dependence is more about automaticity, emotional reliance, and displacement of the rest of life.
Widely used measures in this research area
Citation counts came from the project’s assessment review spreadsheet.
Research Context
The field is moving from “how much time?” to “what kind of pattern?”
Reviews of problematic smartphone use describe loss of control, preoccupation, discomfort without access, neglect of other activities, sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and low mood. They also caution that high use is not automatically harmful. Night use and interference tend to matter more than raw minutes.
What Other Studies Find
Across studies, problematic use is most often tied to mood, stress, and sleep.
A large review of children and young people found that roughly one in four met thresholds for problematic smartphone use, and those thresholds were linked with higher odds of depression, anxiety, stress, and poor sleep. This does not prove causality, but it explains why researchers care about the pattern.
Outside research summary
Bars show how much higher the odds were among young people meeting problematic-use thresholds in Sohn et al. (2019).
DDI scores in the project dataset
Seven score bands from the local DDI study files.
Digital Dependence Index
The DDI turns those ideas into a score people can interpret.
In the project data, the middle score was 56.7 out of 116. Most people were not at the extremes. That is why the results page gives a profile rather than a simple dependent or not-dependent label.
The DDI factors behave differently.
The current DDI profile separates control and interference from emotional checking. That matters because the two patterns connect to wellbeing in somewhat different ways.
Average factor scores by study wave
Scores are rescaled to 0-100 so the two factors can be compared.
What most strongly defines each factor
Factor scores are built from clusters of items, not vibes.
The strongest items show why each factor is there. Control is about failed stopping and interference. Emotional checking is about automatic checking, anticipation, and relief.
The factors overlap, but they are not the same thing.
People who score higher on one part of the DDI often score higher on the other, but the split is still useful: one side is more about losing control or having phone use interfere with life, and the other is more about checking and emotional pull.
Variance explained by factor
How much the factors overlap
Total DDI and wellbeing
Longer bars mean the relationship was clearer in the project data. Green means higher DDI went with less of that outcome.
Higher DDI scores were most clearly tied to lower mindfulness and more stress.
The same pattern also appeared for loneliness, low mood, anxiety, life satisfaction, and attention. These are correlations, so they should be read as evidence of connection, not proof of cause.
The factor profile gives a more specific read.
Control and emotional checking both related to mood, stress, sleep, and social outcomes, but not in identical ways. That is why the results page shows a profile rather than only one total score.
Factor by outcome map
Feelings that most often travel with higher DDI
Dependence is often emotional before it is visible to other people.
In the project data, higher DDI scores were especially connected to using the phone around stress, procrastination, boredom, anxiety, disconnection, and low mood.
People’s own read of their dependence matched the DDI strongly.
Participants who rated themselves as more addicted tended to score higher on the DDI. Confidence that they could change showed the opposite pattern.
Self-perception and DDI
DDI by reported pickup group
The number of phone pickups mattered in a simple way.
People in higher pickup groups had higher DDI scores on average. This is still not the same as saying pickups alone are dependence, but it shows why repeated checking is part of the scale.
When DDI changed, wellbeing tended to change too.
Among participants measured twice, decreases in DDI traveled with increases in mindfulness and decreases in stress, loneliness, low mood, and anxiety. That is the kind of pattern that makes longitudinal follow-up valuable.
Average change among participants measured twice
How DDI change tracked wellbeing change
The strongest change pattern was mindfulness.
When a participant’s DDI score dropped, their mindfulness score tended to rise. Stress, loneliness, low mood, and anxiety moved in the expected direction too.
Why the DDI cares about these factors.
The case for measuring digital dependence is not that phones are bad. It is that dependence-like patterns are connected to attention, mood, sleep, social time, and people’s own sense of control. The DDI is designed to show which part of that pattern is most active for a person.
Research context used here:
Sohn et al., 2019, BMC Psychiatry
Billieux et al., 2015, Current Addiction Reports
Katevas, Arapakis, and Pielot, 2018
Project DDI item, factor, and outcome analyses from the local study files.
Sohn et al., 2019, BMC Psychiatry
Billieux et al., 2015, Current Addiction Reports
Katevas, Arapakis, and Pielot, 2018
Project DDI item, factor, and outcome analyses from the local study files.
Team
The Digital Dependence Index is being developed as a public research assessment by the team below.
Lucas Miller
PLACEHOLDER
—
Lecturer
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
KL
Kyle LaFollette
PLACEHOLDER
—
Principal Researcher and Statistical Consultant
Roman Family Center for Decision Research
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Join future research
The assessment asks for an optional email at the beginning so participants who want to can be invited back for future longitudinal follow-up.
Before you begin
This assessment is part of an ongoing research study on digital dependence and wellbeing. [Placeholder — insert institution name(s), PI name(s), and IRB protocol number before launch.]
Your responses are used for research purposes only. If you choose to share an email for future follow-up, it is stored on the server; the response row stores only a one-way hash for longitudinal matching.
After the DDI, you may also be invited to complete brief optional thinking tasks that measure attention, reasoning, processing speed, and holding and organizing information. You can skip those tasks or stop at any time.
To keep the data usable for research, we use a hidden bot-trap field, server-measured completion time, rate limits, and one-way scrambled versions of your network address and browser type. This site does not store cookies or browser IDs on your device.
This tool is not a diagnostic or clinical instrument. It's built from prior research on digital habits, not a substitute for professional advice.
A few quick details
Optional. If you want to be invited for future follow-up, add an email now so it is not forgotten later.
Your readout
Your DDI profile shows how much choice and calm you seem to have around your phone.
Add more to your profile.
You can add short wellness surveys or thinking tasks. Each one helps us study how phone habits connect with health, attention, memory, and reasoning.
This tool shows general patterns from research data. It is not a medical or mental-health diagnosis. If technology use has been hurting your mood or wellbeing and you are worried, consider talking with someone you trust or a mental health professional. In the US, you can also reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time. [Placeholder — swap in your lab's own resources/contact page before launch.]
DDI dashboardDigital Dependence Index