The Development Of College Students’ Mobile Social Networking Motivation Scale

Social needs are one of the basic needs of human, and it is more advanced. Social interaction is an important way to meet the physiological needs, security needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs. The satisfaction of these demands will further promote the development of social interaction activities. The social interaction of human beings has experienced the language age, the script age, the print age, the telegraph and telephone age, the radio and television age, the electronic information and Internet technology age. Every age has its main social media, such as letter, telegram, telephone,e-mail, etc. These social media help people to break through the constraints of time and space in the social interaction, but their effects on human social interaction far less than the Internet. In the case of Facebook, its users accounted for 1/3 of the total population in the world in early 2014, which marks the internet social networking has become the main way of social interaction. Traditional internet social networking only happened in the fixed computer, the birth of the mobile internet has further break through the constraints of time and space in the social interaction. Mobile internet(MI) is a combination of internet technology, platform, business model, application and mobile communication technology. From the beginning of 2010, MI began its rapid development all around the world, even gradually beyond the traditional social networking, and becoming a more important way of social interaction.Compared with the traditional Internet to mobile Internet, MI is more convenient and instantaneous. Needless to say, it greatly facilitates people’s life, but the emerging vocabulary such as "phubber", "party of mobile phone", "mobile phone addiction" also showed that MI has negative impact on people’s psychological health. Previous studiesfound the important factor leads to mobile phone addiction is that people extremely rely on the mobile internet networking. Motivation is the internal reason that drives individuals to engage in various activities. Combined with the characteristics of mobile social networking 、 the related concepts of social motivation and mobile social networking, this study will define the motivation of mobile social networking as the psychological force that drives individuals to use social software(wechat, QQ, microblog)or web page(all kinds of Internet communities, forums, post bar, etc.) through smartphones, tablets and other mobile terminal equipment to engage in social activities.At present, a number of research reports pointed out that college students are the main users of mobile social networking. Mobile social networking has become an important style of social interaction、learning and living of college students. Therefore, it is an important research topic in the field of psychology.The survey method is the main way to study the motivation of mobile social networking, but there are little scale to measure the motivation of mobile social networking. Hong Liu and Hongli Wang(2011) developed the Mobile Phone Addiction Motive Scale(MPUM), Liang Ma(2012) developed the Wechat User’s Motivation Scale,Zhongyuan Liu(2013)developed the Mobile Social Network User’s Motivation Questionnaire. But in general, the existing scales lack some psychometric indicators.This study is based on the relevant literature and questionnaire, and combined with the results of the open questionnaire survey of college students, then developed a preliminary scale which contains 52 items. 354 valid data were recovered in the first test,and deleted some unqualified items according to the item analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Finally, the formal scale of 23 items was formed. Then, the reliability and validity analysis showed that internal consistency reliability, Split half reliability,test-retest reliability, content validity, construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity were meet with measuring standards, indicated that the scale has good reliability and validity and could be used for the investigation. We investigated 915 participants in Chongqing and Hunan province in the formal investigation. By the descriptive statistical analysis, variance analysis, trend analysis, mediating effect test and so on, it revealed the characteristics of contemporary college students’ motivation of mobile social networking.We also explored the relationship between mobile social networking motivation and personality, mobile phone addiction.The results are as follows:(1) The College Students’ Mobile Social Networking Motivation Scale consists of23 items, including 6 dimensions: interpersonal communication, information exchange,passive specification, career development, convenient and economic, self expression.(2) The College Students’ Mobile Social Networking Motivation Scale has good reliability and validity, which could be used for the further studies.(3) The overall level of college students’ mobile social networking motivation is high. The motivation of female college students in the information exchange, passive specification, convenient and economic, self expression and overall motivation level are significantly higher than male college students. The interpersonal motivation of freshman students was significantly higher than senior students. The passive specification motivation of sophomore students was significantly higher than the freshman students and junior students. The self-expression motivation of freshman students was significantly higher than that of the senior students. Generally speaking, the level of mobile social networking motivation of College Students decreases with the increase of the grade. The difference between different nationalities, different professional college students’ mobile social networking motivation was not significant; only child’s interpersonal motivation was significantly higher than the non only child.(4) The interpersonal communication, passive specification, career development,and self expression motivation of College Students’ mobile social networking play a partial mediating role between neurotic personality and mobile phone addiction.