Validity and reliability of the Chinese version of Mobile Phone Involvement Questionnaire in college students

OBJECTIVE To test the validity and reliability of the Chinese version of Mobile Phone Involvement Questionnaire (MPIQ) in college students. METHODS We assessed the degree of phone dependence using the MPIQ among 2122 college students. One month later, 60 students were randomly selected for assessment with the MPIQ, and the ROC curve was generated to evaluate the true positive rate (sensitivity) and false positive rate at different cutoff values to determine the optimal cutoff score of the MPIQ. RESULTS Among 98.9% of the participants who finished all the items, their MPIQ scores show a positive skew distribution and a one-factor structure. The load scores of the items ranged from 0.54 to 0.77. The Cronbach's α coefficient and the Spearman Brown split reliability were 0.84 and 0.83, respectively, the correlation coefficients between the items and total score ranged from 0.54 to 0.76, and the test-retest reliability was 0.48 (P < 0.001). At the optimal cut-off score of 32, the sensitivity and the specificity of the MPIQ were 0.634 and 0.652, respectively. CONCLUSIONS At the optimal cut-off score of 32, the MPIQ has good validity and reliability for assessing phone dependence among college students.