ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1572963
Smartphone Addiction and Academic Procrastination Among College Students: A Serial Mediation Model of Self-Control and Academic Self-Efficacy
Provisionally accepted- 1Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou, China
- 2South China Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
- 3Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, Henan Province, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Researches have highlighted the individual roles of smartphone addiction (SA), self-control (S-C), and academic self-efficacy (AS-E) in predicting academic procrastination (AP), but studies on how these variables combine to affect AP are scarce. Drawing inspiration from the conceptual model of procrastination, this research endeavors to examine a serial mediation model in which SA serves as a precursor, with S-C and AS-E acting as serial mediators in predicting AP among college students who are prone to it. Participants were 1269 Chinese undergraduates (989 females, Mage = 19.03± 1.00) from seven major regions in China. Data were collected using an online questionnaire.Descriptive and mediation analyses were conducted in SPSS 25.0. The findings revealed that SA is indirectly linked to AP through independent and sequential mediation by S-C and AS-E. People with high SA reported lower levels of S-C, which in turn was associated with lower AS-E, and these were associated with higher reports of AP. These findings offer significant contributions to the current body of research on AP, laying the groundwork for the development of interventions focused on reducing AP among college students.
Keywords: Smartphone addiction, academic procrastination, Self-Control, Academic selfefficacy, college students
Received: 08 Feb 2025; Accepted: 28 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xiuli, Huahua, Zaoming, Libing and Tian. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chang Tian, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, Guangdong, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.