Is phubbing a matter for educators: A case for pre-service and in-service teachers

Abstract

Becoming one of the indispensable tools of our daily life, mobile phones have accelerated the pace of our life by facilitating our business affairs. In addition to the good aspects of these tools reshaping even our habits, they also have various psychological and physiological damages. One of the behaviors for which the cell phone is considered as harmful is phubbing. Phubbing is defined as giving the perception of the individual to his/her mobile phone, not to these people during the communication with other individuals. Considering the increasing use of such technological tools in the classroom, within the scope of phubbing, the status of teachers, one of the important stakeholders of the education environment, is also important. From this point of view, in this study, it was purposed to examine the status of being phubber of pre-service and in-service teachers and their exposure to phubbing in terms of age and gender variables. The study designed in correlational survey method, was conducted with the data collected from 293 people, 46 in-service teachers and 247 pre-service teachers, through the Generic Scale of Phubbing and Generic Scale of Being Phubbed. The independent samples t-Test and Pearson correlation analysis were implemented in the context of the research questions. The results of the analysis indicated that the pre-service teachers are higher in terms of both being a phubber and phubbee than the in-service teachers. In addition to this, it was comprehended that these concepts did not differ in terms of gender and age. On the other hand, it was found out that the behavior of being a phubber tended to increase as getting older. Moreover, it was observed that the participants and the pre-service teachers who were phubber were also exposed to this behavior.