New measures of digital technology use: What they can tell us about our digital lives

Led by the principal investigator, Joanna Witowska, the TIMED team have developed and validated two new scales to assess everyday digital technology use.

The Immersion in Digital Life and Quality of Digital Experience Scales (Witowska et al., 2025) now available here measure to what extent we rely on digital technology in different areas of life and how we experience digital engagement.

The question of how much time we spend on screens has captured the attention of mainstream media and researchers alike. Efforts have focused on quantifying digital time to evaluate how healthy our digital behaviours are. However, understanding the impact of digital engagement on our lives also requires exploring how we experience it. The TIMED team therefore interviewed 300 people across Europe about their everyday digital experiences. The most common digital practices and experiences were compiled and incorporated into two questionnaires, which were developed, refined and validated in three studies.

The 5-item Immersion in Digital Life Scale measures the extent to which we use digital technology for everyday tasks in proportion to the engagement in non-digital activities. It therefore provides a relativized or contextualized picture of the pervasiveness of digital activity. The 26-item Quality of Digital Experience Scale assesses to what degree digital technologies are perceived to support wellbeing, social connectedness, and time and efficiency. Thus, it explores the value that digital technologies hold for us in a non-pathologizing and holistic way. Both scales are excellent tools to obtain an understanding of digital experiences and their impact without limiting the focus to specific digital tools or platforms or merely quantifying screen time.

Preview of the Immersion in Digital Life Scale and Quality of Digital Experience Scale (copies of the full measures are accessible here)

The development and validation of both measures have now been published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. To access the article, please click here. Copies of the Immersion in Digital Life and Quality of Digital Experience Scales are accessible here.