The benefits, of course, are substantial. However, do you think you would be able to accurately guess how much you really use your phone on a daily basis? Probably not.

 

But that is exactly what two students in AP Statistics sought to do. First, they asked each participant how much they think they use their phone on one day from the school week and one day from the weekend. Then, they actually tracked their phones using the Moment app to compare their results.

 

Of the many results, here are some samples:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most people, as you might have guessed, were off from their estimates. Based on the results of the experiment, the average person was 75.5 minutes off their guess--that is more than an hour off per day of phone usage. Most students underestimated how much they actually used their phone.

 

Notice that there were some extremes. One used their phone as much as six and a half hours a day, quite consistently over the weekend and weekday. Another, on the other hand, used their phones at a comparatively paltry seventy four minutes.

 

The experiment consisted of two components; first guessing how much one uses their phone and then actually tracking it. Two days, a Tuesday and a Saturday was randomly selected so the experiment would encompass both a weekday and a weekend.

 

Lucille Nual, one of the seniors who participated was one of the closest to her estimates, explains “The study really made me think. The data of Moment was pretty great because it also shows the number of times you picked up a phone. I mostly just used my phone when I was bored.”

 

Chelsey Noorda, another senior who conducted the experiment, said that “I thought it was a really cool way to measure whether we recognize how much we use our technology.”

 

The project ended up being a state finalist sent to the nationals AP Statistics Poster Competition.

 

Of course, this isn’t a representative sample but it does provide some insight into how much we use our phones. The experiment itself is prone to several problems: first, its not a representative sample at it only encompasses high school seniors. Second, only 15 participants were selected. Finally, selecting any one given day rather than averaging a week also was prone to high variability between phone usage on a daily basis.

 

Katierose Epstein, one of the survey participants, also mentioned how her phone usage varied widely between day to day. On the weekday selected, “I was 240 minutes off but the following day I was only 40 minutes off.” For me, it depends on which day of block schedule we are on.

 

From the few seconds waiting for the bell to ring or messaging a friend, most people seem to use their phone a lot more than they think they do. While some people were only twenty minutes off their estimates, others were off by more than two hundred.

 

Ryan Ebel mentioned that after the experiment, he even was more critical of his phone usage and started to use it less, as his records show.

 

“Thinking about it made me realize how automatic it’s become for me to use my phone. I’ve been trying to control that impulse,” he said.

It might be a fun experiment for you to try as well, and see if you use your phone as much as you think you really do.