The Examination of Relationship between Smart Phone, Internet Addiction and Upper Extremity Fuctional Activity Levels among Nursing Students

Objective: this study was conducted in order to examine the relationship between smart phone, internet addiction and upper extremity functional activity levels of nursing students.material-method: study which was conducted in definitive and sectional pattern, was carried out with 289 nursing student that continue education in 2015-2016 term and at a university which remain in the western part of turkey and reachable during research and volunteered for the study. in the collection of study data; “ student description form”, “smart phone addiction scale-short form” (spas-sf), “internet addiction scale” (ias), “the disabilities of arm, shoulder and hand” (dash) were used. in the evaluation of data; number, percentage, average ± standard deviation and independent t test, one way variance analysis (anova) and pearson correlation analysis were used.results: the average age of the students participating in the survey is 20,87 ± 1,68 (min: 18, max: 29), 77,9% are girls and 28,4% are in third grade. forty-five percent of the students said they stayed in the dormitory, 42,6% said they control more their smartphones more than 40 times per day, and 49,5% rated themselves as smartphone addicts. the average spas-sf total score of the students who participated in the research was 23,31 ± 10,20, the mean total score of the ias was 73,62 ± 22,68 and the dash average total score was 42,97 ± 12,18. as a result of statistical analysis; there was a significant positive correlation between spas-sf, ias and dash (p<0,05). the mean total dash score of the female students was significantly higher than male students (p<0,05) and there was no significant difference between the gender factor and the ias and spas-sf test scores (p>0,05). age, place of residence did not affect smart phone and internet dependency levels in the study.conclusions: in result of this study, it was found that nursing department students are smartphone and internet addicts in moderate level.