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Maternal Smartphone Use in the Situation /
Guilt About Smartphone (Non-)Use, Recovery, and Accomplishment Experiences Among Mothers
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Description: Balancing everyday tasks with the expectations of others regarding one’s availability via smartphone is a challenge, especially for mothers. This research replicated and further developed studies by Halfmann et al. (2021, 2023) that yielded contradictory results regarding the conditions of feelings of guilt about (not) using the smartphone. More specifically, we investigated how smartphone-related goal conflict, the availability norm, and the parental phone use norm are related to mothers’ feelings of guilt when completing non-stressful everyday tasks. In addition, we researched how smartphone-related goal conflict and guilt are linked with experiences of recovery and task accomplishment. Results from a preregistered experience sampling study among 227 mothers of young children were largely in line with our hypotheses. They revealed, among others, that frequent smartphone use was more strongly linked with guilt when mothers perceived high goal conflict. If the availability norm was salient, little smartphone use was associated with more guilt. The results also indicated that the availability norm partly legitimized frequent smartphone use despite goal conflict. Nevertheless, overall, the findings suggest that mothers tend to experience low levels of guilt about their smartphone usage behavior and that these feelings do not impair the recovery from tasks. This OSF folder contains additional documents for the paper including the data, the R output, the questionnaires in German, and an overview over all measures used in the study.