Dipartimento ambiente costruzioni e design (DACD)

The widespread diffusion of smartphones has opened new challenges regarding the psychological consequences of their usage on social relationships. The term phubbing (a combination of phone and snubbing) indicates the act of ignoring someone in a social context by paying attention to the smartphone. The few existing studies show that phubbing is widespread, mutually reinforced, and socially accepted, with possible negative consequences for social and individual well-being. Phubbing can occur in every social context, including romantic relationships, workplaces, and family. However, to date, minimal attention has been given to the possible impact that phubbing carried out by parents can have on their children. To start filling this gap, in this paper, we introduced a new scale that measures the perception of being subject to parental phubbing and showed the prevalence of perceived phubbing on a stratified sample of 3,289 adolescents. Firstly, the dimensionality, validity, and invarian...

Multi-item ordered categorical scales and structural equation modelling approaches are often used in panel research for the analysis of latent variables over time. The accuracy of such models depends on the assumption of longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI), which states that repeatedly measured latent variables should effectively represent the same construct in the same metric at each time point. Previous research has widely contributed to the LMI literature for continuous variables, but these findings might not be generalized to ordered categorical data. Treating ordered categorical data as continuous contradicts the assumption of multivariate normality and could potentially produce inaccuracies and distortions in both invariance testing results and structural parameter estimates. However, there is still little research that examines and compares criteria for establishing LMI with ordinal categorical data. Drawing on this lack of evidence, the present chapter offers a detaile...

This study used a subsample of a household panel study in Italy to track changes in mental health before the onset of COVID-19 and into the first lockdown period, from late April to early September 2020. The results of the random-effects regression analyses fitted on a sample of respondents aged 16 years and older (N = 897) proved that there was a substantial and statistically significant short-term deterioration in mental health (from 78,5 to 67,9; β = -10.5, p < .001; Cohen’s d -.445), as measured by a composite index derived from the mental component of the 12-item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-12). The findings also showed heterogeneity in the COVID-related effects. On the one hand, evidence has emerged that the pandemic acted as a great leveller of pre-existing differences in mental health across people of different ages: the decrease was most pronounced among those aged 16–34 (from 84,2 to 66,5; β = -17.7, p < .001; Cohen’s d -.744); however, the magnitude of change reduc...

Current theories of intelligence maintain that intellectual development is the expression of a strict interplay among different cognitive abilities and the environment. Yet, the environment in which the individual develops has often been reduced to a single measure in empirical research, which thus loses sight of its inherent multifaceted structure. This work stems from the need to grasp such multifaceted complexity, by differentiating the associations of cultural and socioeconomic factors with crystallized and fluid intelligence in adolescence. An updated and digitalized version of the Verbal task from the Primary Mental Abilities battery (PMA Verbal) was administered to a large group of Italian adolescents as a measure of crystallized intelligence. Item Response Theory confirmed the good psychometric properties of the test. The relationship among cognitive abilities and the environment was explored through a Network Analysis on measures of crystallized intelligence (PMA Verbal), f...

In recent years, smartphones have become the most popular and ubiquitous tool for adolescents to access the internet in developed countries (Mascheroni & Ólafsson, 2016). Increasingly, children’s and teens’ daily lives tend to gravitate around their smartphones, mainly for social uses: they spend a good deal of time with their mobile devices communicating and “hanging out” with friends, posting and responding to each others’ messages, but also playing multiplayer games, surfing the web and listening to music in a state of constant connectedness (Chayko, 2017). However, the pervasiveness of this device, even in the most relevant moments of the day has raised some concerns about its confinement capabilities by users. Turkle (2014, 2016) has argued that significant smartphone use at important moments of the day, such as family dinner or sleeping hours, can be socially and psychologically harmful. A growing literature exists on smartphone overuse, which has investigated the psychological roots of this phenomenon and has highlighted its negative consequences (see Elhai et al., 2017 for a review). In particular, a problematic relationship between excessive smartphone use and youth wellbeing is emerging in a number of studies (Lee et al., 2014; Lee, Cho, Kim, & Noh, 2015; Demirci et al., 2015), in addition to its negative association with academic performances at different educational levels (Samaha & Hawi, 2016; Hawi & Samaha, 2016). In this paper we test the hypothesis that smartphone pervasiveness in adolescents’ daily life represents a new source of digital and social inequality by analyzing data on the entire high-school student population of the Valle D’Aosta region, in Northern Italy (N=4,675). By means of a mediation analysis, we show how smartphone pervasiveness mediates the relationship between students’ social origins – measured though their parents’ educational level – and learning outcomes, thus contributing to deepening the academic divide between high and low-performing students.

In the last few decades, educational literature and policy makers have increasingly supported research into affective competencies—attitudes, emotions, values/ethics and motivation—as a key requirement to fostering positive youth development in the area of active and engaged citizenship. Considering that adolescents have limited opportunities to undertake civic and political activities until the age of majority, robust indicators of their affective competencies could represent valid alternatives for the analysis of their educational needs and the prediction of their future engagement. Nonetheless, researchers interested in comparing these self-perceived measures across individuals and groups must pay particularly attention to the assumption of their strong factorial invariance, which could lead to inaccurate inferences if violated. On these grounds, the present study validates and assesses the cross-group equivalence of the affective civic competence (ACC) latent construct on a sample of 3366 Italian 8th grade students, exploring also the individual differences emerging in its latent mean structure. The factorial validity of the construct and its measurement invariance across students’ gender and ethnicity are proved through the statistical techniques of second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multi-group mean and covariance structure analysis (MG-MACS). Results of the cross-group comparisons show that students’ gender does not lead to significant differences in their overall ACC mean score after correcting for partial scalar invariance, while members of ethnic minorities prove to be disadvantaged compared to natives. Limitations of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed.