focus and notifications

Introduction

I downloaded data from on digital lifestyle and mental health. More specifically, the “Digital Lifestyle Benchmark Dataset” from Kaggle. From the many variables measured in this data set, I decided to examine the relationship between focus score and the amount of notifications are received per day.

I am interested in this because, of course, it has always been said that phones are a distraction and I wanted to see if this data supports that. More specifically, I wonder: Does being overly involved in our digital lives relate to lack of focus in our real lives?

I hypothesize that, the more notifications a person gets per day, the lower their focus score will be.

Methods

First, I formulated a linear regression plot to get an idea of what the data looks like. Upon first glance, I could tell the data of focus score vs notifications per day was worth my consideration and that there was likely a significant relationship.

library(ggplot2) 
SP<-ggplot(ah,aes(x=notifications_per_day,y=focus_score))+ 
  geom_point(color="orange")+ 
  geom_smooth(method="lm",col="red",fill="cadetblue")+ 
  labs(title="Linear Regression with a 95% Confidence Interval", 
       subtitle="Formula: notifications per day ~ focus score")+ 
  theme_minimal() SP 

From there, I created a scatter plot of the data and ran a Pearson’s correlation test.

plot(notifications_per_day ~ focus_score, data=ah, log="xy") 

focus<-cor.test(ah$notifications_per_day,ah$focus_score, method="pearson") focus

Results

From my analysis, I found that there is an extremely significant negative correlation (p=2.2e-16, r=-0.77) between focus score and notifications per day. This means that, the more notifications per day a person gets, the less focused they are. This make sense. After all, the purpose of notifications are to draw our attention and elicit a response.

t = -71.524, df = 3498, p-value < 2.2e-16 
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0 
95 percent confidence interval:  -0.7837712 -0.7568445 
sample estimates:        cor  -0.7706516 

Discussion

This result is interesting to me because I am always trying to find ways to keep myself focused and on-task. This analysis shows me how important it is to have your device on Do Not Disturb when you are trying to focus on a task. It is clear that notifications are a detriment to ones focus.

For future research, I would be interested to see if this correlation still holds true when participants have their devices on Do Not Disturb. I hypothesize that if a person is not receiving the vibration or visual cue of a notification, as is the case when a device is on Do Not Disturb and out of view, it should not distract them as much.