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Stress and multitasking in everyday college life: an empirical study of online activity

Authors:

Melissa NiiyaAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 41 - 50

https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557361

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

While HCI has focused on multitasking with information workers, we report on multitasking among Millennials who grew up with digital media - focusing on college students. We logged computer activity and used biosensors to measure stress of 48 students for 7 days for all waking hours, in their in situ environments. We found a significant positive relationship with stress and daily time spent on computers. Stress is positively associated with the amount of multitasking. Conversely, stress is negatively associated with Facebook and social media use. Heavy multitaskers use significantly more social media and report lower positive affect than light multitaskers. Night habits affect multitasking the following day: late-nighters show longer duration of computer use and those ending their activities earlier in the day multitask less. Our study shows that college students multitask at double the frequency compared to studies of information workers. These results can inform designs for stress management of college students.

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.2196/48974
Hossain EWadley GBerthouze NCox A(2024)Social Media Breaks: An Opportunity for Recovery and ProcrastinationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373998:CSCW1(1-46)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637399
Monge Roffarello ADe Russis L(2024)Hey StepByStep! Can you teach me how to use my phone better?International Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103195183:COnline publication date: 14-Mar-2024
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Index Terms

Stress and multitasking in everyday college life: an empirical study of online activity
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2014

4206 pages

ISBN:9781450324731

DOI:10.1145/2556288

General Chairs:
Matt Jones
Swansea University, Wales, UK
,
Philippe Palanque
Université Paul Sabatier, France
,
Program Chairs:
Albrecht Schmidt
University of Stuttgart, Germany
,
Tovi Grossman
Autodesk Research, Canada

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 26 April 2014

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April 26 - May 1, 2014

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CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Suh JHowe ELewis RHernandez JSaha KAlthoff TCzerwinski M(2024)Toward Tailoring Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention Systems for Workplace Stress Reduction: Exploratory Analysis of Intervention ImplementationJMIR Mental Health10.2196/4897411(e48974)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/48974
Hossain EWadley GBerthouze NCox A(2024)Social Media Breaks: An Opportunity for Recovery and ProcrastinationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373998:CSCW1(1-46)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637399
Monge Roffarello ADe Russis L(2024)Hey StepByStep! Can you teach me how to use my phone better?International Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103195183:COnline publication date: 14-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103195
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