Screening questionnaire
Smartphone Addiction Test (SAS-SV)
The Smartphone Addiction Scale short version: ten published items that ask whether your phone is getting into your work, your attention and your time.
- Published items
- Not a diagnosis
- Items
- 10
- Time
- 2 min
- Scales
- 1
- Scale
- 6-pt
Free, no account needed. A screening questionnaire, not a diagnosis.
You'll find out: Whether your phone use is costing you planned work, focus and time, using the ten published SAS-SV items. A screening questionnaire, not a diagnosis.
Want to understand what you’re about to do? The sections below explain what this assessment measures, where the questions came from, and what you’ll see at the end. Already decided? The start button is up top.
What this is really asking
The SAS-SV was built by Min Kwon and colleagues in 2013 as a short form of their 33-item Smartphone Addiction Scale. Its ten items cover the parts of problem use that showed up most reliably in that longer scale: daily-life disturbance such as missed work and lost concentration, withdrawal when the phone is out of reach, preoccupation when it is not in use, overuse beyond what you intended, and other people noticing.
It does not count screen time. Two people with the same hours can score very differently, because the scale asks what the use is costing you, not how much of it there is. That is also why it pairs well with the procrastination test on this site. Reaching for the phone is one of the most common ways to avoid starting something, and the two results together tell you whether the phone is the cause of the delay or just where the delay goes.
Every item is scored from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree), and the total runs from 10 to 60. There is no neutral midpoint, which is deliberate in the original design: each answer has to lean one way.
The scale
- Problematic Use — Daily-life disruption, withdrawal, preoccupation and overuse
What lands on your screen at the end
You get your total out of 60 and where it sits against the published cutoffs, which are 31 for males and 33 for females. The test does not ask your sex, so it shows the total against both. You also see the items you agreed with most, which are the practical part of the result.
Read the cutoffs with their origin in mind. They were set in a study of 540 Korean middle-school students with an average age of 14.5, and the scale has since been used with adults, but the thresholds were not re-derived for them. This is a screening questionnaire, not a diagnosis, and smartphone addiction is not a formal diagnosis in DSM-5.
Where these questions came from
SAS-SV (Smartphone Addiction Scale – Short Version)
Kwon, M., Kim, D.-J., Cho, H., & Yang, S. (2013). The Smartphone Addiction Scale: Development and validation of a short version for adolescents. PLoS ONE, 8(12), e83558. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0083558. Published under CC BY 4.0.
This version: The ten published items from the paper's English appendix, word for word, with the original six-point scale. Item 8 still names Twitter and Facebook because that is the wording that was validated.
This is a screening questionnaire for reflection and education. It is not a diagnosis, and it cannot replace an assessment by a clinician. No account is required and your answers are not shared.
Common questions
What is a high score on the SAS-SV?
The published cutoffs are 31 for males and 33 for females, on a total that runs from 10 to 60. In the validation study those thresholds separated the high-risk group with high accuracy. They were derived from Korean adolescents, though, so for adults a score near the cutoff is a reason to look at your habits rather than a clinical finding.
Is smartphone addiction a real diagnosis?
Not formally. DSM-5 includes gambling disorder and lists internet gaming disorder for further study, but it has no smartphone addiction diagnosis. The SAS-SV measures problematic use by borrowing the structure of addiction measures, such as withdrawal and loss of control, and a high score means those patterns are present, not that you have a disorder.
Does this test measure screen time?
No. It asks about consequences and control: missed plans, lost concentration, restlessness without the phone, and using it longer than you meant to. Screen time on its own is a weak signal, because hours spent on something you chose can be fine while twenty minutes you did not intend can be the problem this scale is built to find.
What should I do with a high score?
Start with the items you agreed with most, because they point at the specific pattern. Changing the setup usually works better than willpower. Keep the phone out of the room during work, turn off the notifications that pull you back, and decide in advance what you will do when you notice the urge. The focus tools on this site are built for that last step.