LAUSR

Nowadays, due to its complexity the mobile phone became a smart phone that can be used everywhere in both our professional and personal life. Smartphone usage has become of interest for psychology in order to understand whether the excessive use could be a sign of addiction and to create a clear definition and valid instruments to evaluate this possible new type of addiction. This study aims to validate the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS) in the Romanian cultural context and to examine the structure of the SAS using a bifactor approach. The exploratory factorial analysis made on a sample of Romanian students (n = 371), revealed a five-factor solution for the SAS. Three models were compared: the one-factor, the five-factor and the bifactor model. The confirmatory factor analysis supported that the bifactor structure was the best fit solution (χ2(452) = 1131.79, p < 0.001, CFI = .870, TLI = .848, RMSEA = .064, SMRS = .054, AIC = 1349.79). The results of the study showed that the bifactor approach of the SAS is the best fit solution and it can be successfully used in research regarding the problematic use of mobile phones. This study is the first which validate an instrument to measure the smartphone addiction on Romanian population and which analyze the SAS’s structure using a bifactor approach which could resolve the differences in the factor structure’s results for this instrument.