The Conceptual Framework of Pathological Smartphone Use (PSU)

During the last decade, smartphones have gained popularity all over the world. It is reported, over 50% of mobile subscribers in the US and 65% of mobile subscribers in South Korea are using smartphones, and these percentages keep on increasing. Many studies had been carried out to determine the impact of technology addiction and other related problems and had found that these users exhibit disturbed behavior on the usage. Noticeably, there is a dearth of study to examine the positive impact of technology addiction in Malaysia. Likewise, little is known about the positive effect of mobile device pathology. As such, this research aims to investigate this phenomenon from the other side of the coin, which is to hypothesize that smartphone pathology may positively affect a person's well-being to be a smart consumer.