Smartphone Addiction Test — Free SAS-SV, 10 Questions

The SAS-SV does not measure screen time. It is a 10-item scale about how hard it is for you to control your smartphone use. The questions describe everyday moments: not getting to things you had planned, struggling to concentrate in class, on homework or at work, pain in your wrists or the back of your neck, feeling restless without your phone, thinking about it when you are not using it, using it longer than you meant to, and hearing from others that you use it too much.

You answer each item on a 6-point scale from 'Strongly disagree' to 'Strongly agree', scored 1 to 6, so the total ranges from 10 to 60. There is no neutral middle option, so you always lean one way or the other. The questions do not name a time period, so answer for your usual self rather than an unusual stretch like exam week or a school vacation.

Soundary shows your total in three bands: 10–30 is the usual-use range, 31–32 is a borderline zone, and 33–60 is the overdependence-risk range. These bands come from the cut-offs in the original study: 31 for males and 33 for females. The test does not ask your sex, so a score of 31–32 means you meet the risk cut-off if you are male and sit just below it if you are female.

The score is a screening result that reflects your current habits, not a judgment about you and not a diagnosis. Which items you scored high on tells you more than the total. If the items about focus and planned tasks are high, the habit to change is different from when the unease of being without your phone stands out. If school or work requires long hours on your phone, answer based on whether you can stop when you want to, not on how many hours you spend.

The SAS-SV is the short version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale, published by Kwon and colleagues in PLoS ONE in 2013 and developed for adolescents from the start. Its items include scenes familiar to secondary-school students, such as class, homework and conversations on social media, and its cut-offs also come from research with adolescents. Adults can use the same items to check their habits, but should treat the band boundaries as reference lines.

A teacher can create a group link: students start right away without signing in, each person sees only their own score, and the group sees only an anonymous distribution. Setting a follow-up test 2, 4 or 12 weeks later lets a class compare before and after trying something like turning off notifications. On your own, you can save your result and compare it with your previous one; if sleep or schoolwork keeps suffering, talk to a school counselor or a mental health professional.