Mobile Phone Usage And Its Influencing Factors

With the development of electronic communications and wireless network technology, the mobile phone has become increasingly popular and even indispensable in everyday life, and hence attracted wide attention from researchers and scholars in various fields. To explore the mobile phone usage and its influencing factors, the current study mainly adopts the exploratory & confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, social network analysis and structure equation modeling (SEM) technology, in an effort to provide mobile phone design with solid psychological theories. Based on the retrospection of relevant studies, we firstly propose the definition for mobile phone usage, and summarize its influencing factors into four types, i.e, user need, user experience, behavior control and social network. Then, we review findings from motivation, attitude and social network studies and integrate them into a . re-specified and extended model based upon the theory of planned behavior. 741 undergraduates in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Ningbo China participated in this research by finishing five questionnaires each. The current study mainly contains six parts: (1) Usage structure, (2) users' need structure and the relationship between user need and usage, (3) users' experience structure and the relationship between user experience and usage, (4) behavior control structure and relationship between behavior control and usage, (5) social network feature and the relationship between social network and usage, (6) five mental ; models developed for every behavior pattern based on the proposed model and data from the questionnaires. The main results are listed as follows:(1) The usage is divided into five progressively more extensive categories: network application, entertainment, tools, communication and individual management.(2) The user need contains five progressively more extensive categories: social need, personal need, information need, self-management need and safety need.(3) The user experience contains four progressively more extensive categories: ease experience, usefulness experience, sociality experience, and fun experience.(4) The behavior control contains four progressively more extensive categories: dependence control, adaptive control and self-efficacy.(5) The mean of mobile phone users' network size is 9.7, with personal network size being 6 or 7, group network size 3 or 4, and the type of relationship is 3 or 4. The top five relationships are lovers or good friends, parents, roommates or neighbors, classmates and relatives.(6) The primary factors which influence mobile phone network application usage are self-efficacy and information need.(7) The primary factors which influence mobile phone entertainment usage are usefulness experience, personal need, self management need and self-efficacy.(8) The primary factors which influence mobile phone tools usage are self management need, self-efficacy, personal need and sociality experience.(9) The primary factors which influence mobile phone communication usage are safety need, sociality experience and dependence control.(10) The primary factors which influence mobile phone individual management usage are ease experience, self management need and sociality experience.Finally, based on the above ten results, we propose suggestions for future mobile phone optimization design.