The Mobile App Users Psychological Needs Structure And Cross-Situation Consistency

In psychology field,understanding individual’s psychological needs has been paid widespread interests.Generally,the researches about needs were focused on two perspectives:the needs’ relatively static structures and the their dynamic functions.Firstly,the structure of needs was conceptualized by different theories.Among them,Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was considered as the most classical theory in the past 100 years.It is reasonable to expect that the human’s needs structure,as well as the ways to satisfy these needs have been changed over the years.In the age of Internet,people began to satisfy some of their needs by surfing the net.With the appearance of mobile Internet technology and Apps.the people’s lifestyle has changed greatly.People spend a lot of time using different kinds of Apps.According to App Annie(2018)’s report,each user spent almost 3 hours on App’s usage every day.Therefore,it is an effective way to explore the structure of needs from the perspective of App usage behaviors.Different from the relevant needs studies which were mainly focused on the users’ needs about a certain App or one category of Apps.This study tried to study the App users’ psychological needs and its difference with previous needs theories from an overall perspective.Secondly,there is a general consensus among researchers that psychological needs serve as the driving force and deep-rooted explanations for modern human behaviors.Among the researches about how persons and situations contribute to behavioral consistency,there were two opposite opinions:the one was the "person" argument,which claimed that the same individual’s typical behavior patterns were stable and trait-like across situations.These patterns could be predicted by the individual’s psychological traits.The other one was the "situation" argument,which claimed that behaviors were driven by situations,so a individuals’ typical behavior patterns were highly variable across situations.However,the researches which supported the "person"argument mainly focused on the personality.Few empirical researches invested whether the individual’s psychological needs were trait-like.Based on the a large-sized private enterprise and our university’s cooperation project,this study used a large dataset of anonymous users’ App usage records to examine whether the individual’s needs-based profiles of App usage were consistent across different situations(as indexed by categories of App functions).As a practical application,the stable needs profiles were used to predict the user’s smartphone’s brand preference.After a systematic review of the above studies,in study 1 and study 2,qualitative and quantitative methods were combined to established a mobile App user’s psychological needs model.In study 3 and study 4,the above model was used for the App’s review’s text mining.With lexical matching technology and machine learning algorithms about text analysis and classification,a model was trained to automatically provide each app with the different types of needs they satisfied.Based on the above needs model and text mining technologies,millions of anonymous users’ communications data was adopted in the study 5 to exam whether the individual’s needs-based profiles of App usage were consistent across different situations.In study 6,a relatively small sample users1 App usage data were collected to construct a user’s immediate needs evaluation model.Then these users’ needs questionnaire data were also collected to explore the individual’s needs consistency between these two type of data.Study 7 was a practical application of the individual’s needs consistency.According to the App usage behaviors,the user’s needs vector was able to be calculated,and the smartphone’s brands’ needs vectors were able to be analyzed by the reviews.Therefore the user’s brand preference could be calculated as the similarity between the user and brand’s needs vectors.Based on the studies above,the main conclusions were listed as follows:(1)A mobile App users psychological needs model yielded eight types of dimensions:utilitarian,low-cost,security,health,hedonic,social,cognitive,and self-actualization needs.(2)The above App user’s needs were trait-like,namely,on the one hand,an individual’s needs-based profiles of App usage were consistent across different situations,on the other hand,the consistency of an individual’s primary needs reflected by needs questionnaire and Apps usage were relatively high.(3)The feasibility of evaluation user’s needs immediately by App usage data and the App’s needs label.(4)As an application of the needs’ cross-situation consistency,the user’s brand preference could be predicted as the similarity between the user and brand’s needs vectors.The significances of thses studies were as follows:(1)Combining psychological research methods with big data technology to systematically explore what the mobile App users psychological needs were and whether these needs had cross-situation consistency.This methodology overcome the disadvanteges of sample size and representatives in the traditional psychological methods.(2)Constructing a user’s immediate muti-label needs model,which had more values on the application compared with previous needs model with only single label.(3)The cross-situation consistency of mobile users’ needs could play an important role in the cross-domain recommendation systems,which would show the advantages that the existing recommendation systems do not have.