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This study aims to investigate student mentors' perceptions of peer mentor relationships in a health professions education program.

The design uses embodied hermeneutic phenomenology. The data comprise 10 participant interviews and visual “body maps” produced in response to guided questions.

The findings about student mentors' perceptions of peer mentor relationships include a core theme of nurturing a trusting learning community and five related themes of attunement to mentees, commonality of experiences, friends with boundaries, reciprocity in learning and varied learning spaces.

The study contributes original insights by highlighting complexity, shifting boundaries, liminality, embodied social understanding and trusting intersubjective relations as key considerations in student peer mentor relationships.

We have witnessed an evolution in the use of smartphones in recent years. We have been aware for some time of the potentially deleterious impact of smartphones on users' lives and their propensity for user addiction, as reflected in the large and growing body of work on this topic. One modern phenomenon – the distracted mobile phone user in public, or “smartphone zombie” – has received limited research attention. The purpose of the present study is to develop a robust measure of smartphone zombie behaviour.

The research deign comprises three studies: A round of focus groups (n = 5) and two online surveys (survey one n = 373, survey two n = 386), in order to develop and validate a three-factor, 15-item measure named the Smartphone Zombie Scale (SZS).

Following the round of focus groups conducted, Exploratory Factor Analysis and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the SZS measure (Cronbach's α = .932) is demonstrated to be robust and comprises three factors: Attention Deficit (Cronbach's α = .922), Jeopardy (Cronbach's α = .817) and Preoccupation (Cronbach's α = .835), that is shown to be distinct to existing closely related measures (Smartphone Addiction scale and Obsessive Compulsive Use).

The present study represents the first extant attempt to produce a measure of smartphone zombie behaviour, and provides us with a reliable and valid measure with which we can study this growing phenomenon.