The use of smartphones in the physical activities of adolescent girls in Slovakia and the Czech Republic

Abstract

Background The lack of physical activity is a global public health problem. Physical inactivity is the principal risk for obesity and other serious life-threatening diseases. This study is specialized in discovering the use of smartphones in physical activities of females from Slovak Republic and Czech Republic. Purpose The study's objective was to compare how adolescent girls in Slovakia and the Czech Republic used their smartphones for physical activity. Methods The observing group consisted of 1515 females who used smartphones and studied in 3rd and 4th year of high schools, conservatoires and grammar schools in Slovak Republic and Czech Republic. The main method of this work was a survey that consisted of 13 questions. The survey which we distributed to Slovak schools from December 2020 to August 2021 was paper based. The survey distributed to Czech schools was an online survey through google forms. The paper-based survey distributed to Slovak schools was evaluated through TAP3 software by a company based in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. The online survey distributed to Czech schools was evaluated through MS Excel. We analysed the results with the chi-square test at the level of p < 0.01, p < 0.05. For some of our needs we used arithmetic mean. Results We discovered that 49.33% of females from Czech Republic spend 1-3 hours daily on their smartphones. Simultaneously, we discovered, that females from Czech Republic (27.19%) and from Slovak Republic (27.78%) do 3 to 5 hours a day of activities connected with smartphones. Most of these females considered this time as adequate. The majority of activities in which they participated by using their smartphones were social media, chat, or e-mail (65.11%). The negative discovery was that not even 3% of females used their smartphones in connection with physical activities. We found that 69.09% of females from Czech Republic and 67.96% females from Slovak Republic monitor the number of steps or distances walked/ran on their smartphones. We recorded a statistically significant difference at the level of significance p < 0.01 in questions no. 3, 4, 5, 8 and at the significance level p < 0.05 in questions no. 1, 6. Discussion & Conclusion From the point of view of what time they spend with activities related to smartphones, we discovered that most of the females were using their smartphones 1-3 hours daily, with some indicating 3-5 hours of daily activities. A total of 62.06% of females considered time spent with activities on smartphone to be adequate to this era. 22.3% of females realized that presented time of hours spent on smartphone is high. Even though there are a lot of applications that can be helpful in doing physical activity, only a small percentage of our participants used them. Given that some applications work on a group system in which individuals can be added to groups in that application and the participants can motivate each other with their shared goals and results, encouragement should be given by schools for students to download and use such apps.