Development and validation of a nomogram to predict mobile phone addiction risk among Chinese adolescents

To investigate the risk factors of mobile phone addiction in adolescents, and to construct and conduct validation of the nomogram model of mobile phone addiction in adolescents.

Selected secondary school students in a city in Henan Province from January to December 2023 for a convenience sampling, included 6878 cases of valid samples, distributed according to the ratio of 7:3, of which 4814 cases were in the training set and 2064 cases were in the testing set, collected general information and questionnaires of the research subjects. The questionnaires mainly included Self-esteem Scale(SES), Self-Control Scale(SCS), Simplified Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A), and Mobile Phone Addiction Index(MPAI). LASSO regression was applied to screen the characteristic variables, and the regression model was constructed using multifactorial logistic regression with the corresponding nomogram plotted, and the differentiation, calibration and clinical validity of the nomogram model were evaluated through the subject work characteristics (ROC) curve, calibration curve and clinical decision curve (DCA), respectively. To further verify the model's stability and generalizability, an independent external validation dataset-comprising 200 secondary school students demographically consistent with the primary sample-was used to replicate the same evaluation metrics.

Seven characteristic variables were screened by LASSO regression, namely gender, academic performance, emotional abuse, self-control, perception, somatisation and depression, and the model was constructed and confirmed by multifactorial logistic regression that all of the above seven variables were significantly associated with mobile phone addiction in adolescents(P < 0.05); the area under the ROC curve(AUC) of the training set was 0.764[95% CI(0.75, 0.777)]; the AUC of the testing set was 0.756[95% CI(0.735, 0.777)], and the models showed good predictive ability; the goodness-of-fit tests of the training set and testing set as well as the net gain values performed well in terms of school accuracy and clinical validity. Further external validation with an independent sample yielded consistent performance, with an AUC of 0.752 [95% CI (0.676, 0.829)].

The nomogram model constructed by the seven variables of gender, academic performance, emotional abuse, self-control, perception, somatisation, and depression possesses potential utility as a preliminary screening tool to identify the risk of developing mobile phone addiction in adolescents.