Why Do College Students Become Addicted to Mobile Phones? The serial mediating role of Depressive Mood and Social Avoidance in Dormitory Interpersonal Relationships

The near-ubiquity of smartphones has focused growing research attention on mobile phone addiction among college students and its implications for their physical and mental health. The present study approaches this issue from the perspective of dormitory interpersonal relationships, specifically testing whether depressive mood and social avoidance serve as sequential mediators in the pathway from relationship quality to addiction tendency. We administered four instruments, the Dormitory Interpersonal Relationship Scale for College Students, the Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale for College Students, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, and the Social Avoidance Scale, to a sample of 689 undergraduates recruited from six universities across four mainland Chinese provinces. Correlation analyses revealed that all pairwise associations among dormitory relationships, depressive mood, social avoidance, and mobile phone addiction tendency were statistically significant (ps < 0.001). A erial mediation model further indicated that depressive mood and social avoidance fully accounted for the link between dormitory interpersonal relationships and mobile phone addiction tendency (Effect = −0.08, SE = 0.01, 95% CI [−0.08, −0.04]). The pattern suggests that poorer dormitory relations are associated with elevated depressive symptoms, which in turn relate to greater social avoidance; these two factors together are associated with a notably higher probability of problematic phone use. One caveat is that the cross-sectional nature of the data precludes any firm causal inference, the observed mediation should be interpreted as correlational rather than causal. For mental health practitioners in higher education, these findings point to the value of strengthening the dormitory social environment, as well as screening for emotional distress and social withdrawal as early indicators of potential addiction risk.