| As a widely used social application in China,Wechat greatly changed the way of social interaction,and also bring psychological effects on individuals.With the increased use instensity,phenomenons as information anxiety,lack of attention,alone together raised concern these years.Studies about the effects of social networking are not new,but most of them focused on Facebook,used survey method and then got correlational evidences.Researches about Wechat,experimental method and causal evidences are rare.In present study,the effects of Wechat use are explored using field experimental method,possible reasons of these effects are also taken into account using qualitative method.The study is also an attempt of this special field experimental method so that we pay extral attention to key points of design and its underlying problems.Subjective well-being,alienation,work engagement and self-control are choosed as potential effects after literature review and case study.As most people are users of Wechat and have already affected by it,we use reverse intervention(intervene their usage of Wechat).Considering the feasibility,the final intervention comes that,the total time of everyday use should not be more than 30 minutes during 15 days.85 students and employees in Beijing are recruited in the study.22 of them were involved in qualitative study by keeping diaries and interviews,in order to get deep insights on what they experience during 15 days and how these effects come about.Other subjects were assigned to an experimental group or a control group.They were asked to report daily time of Wechat use during 15 days and do the pre test and post test before and after that.The results indicate that the negative affects(affective well-being)of subjects decline after intervention,but life satisfaction(cognitive well-being)remain unchanged.Qualitative materials indicate it should be done by the remission of social comparsion,information overload,compulsive Wechat use and time saving.Alienation remain unchanged,but qualitative study shows the interaction of weak ties were almost disappeared.Work engagement increases significately by the improvement of concentration.Self-control increases in experimental group while it decreases in control group unexpectly.Since the main deficiency of field experimental method is lack of uncontrollable,we concern about potential deviations during all the period,from them we integrate 3 categories,that is,subject deviations,intervention deviation and external deviation.All actual deviation and their impacts are discussed and the applicability and key points of field experimental method are proposed at last. |
