Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 75, October 2017, Pages 891-902
Computers in Human Behavior

Full length article
Examining the effects of motives and gender differences on smartphone addiction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.07.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examine the effects of motives and gender differences on smartphone addiction.

  • We assess four categories of motives: enhancement, social, coping, and conformity.

  • The moderating role of gender is also examined.

  • All motives except for social relationship affect smartphone addiction.

  • Gender significantly moderates the influences of motives.

Abstract

Smartphones have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, it may be addiction-prone and result in negative outcomes. Given that relevant research remains limited, this study attempts to address two research gaps in the extant information systems literature. First, research on the determinants of smartphone addiction remains scarce. Second, the role of individual characteristics (i.e., gender) in the formation of smartphone addiction is far from clear. To fill these research gaps, this study develops a research model of smartphone addiction from the functionalist perspective and highlights the moderating role of gender with the insight of social orientation. We propose four categories of motives, including enhancement (i.e., perceived enjoyment), social (i.e., social relationship), coping (i.e., mood regulation and pastime), and conformity motives (i.e., conformity). Empirical results from our online survey illustrate that perceived enjoyment, mood regulation, pastime, and conformity positively affect smartphone addiction, whereas social relationship has no significant effect. Moreover, we find that gender moderates the effects of perceived enjoyment, pastime, and conformity on smartphone addiction. We expect that this study can enrich the theoretical understanding of how motives play different roles in the development of smartphone addiction. Implications are offered for both research and practice.

Introduction

Smartphones have become globally popular (Lee, Chang, Lin, & Cheng, 2014). The various functions of smartphones have attracted millions of users to switch from regular cell phones (Salehan & Negahban, 2013). Aside from the benefits, using smartphones may also result in unwanted consequences. Some users may use smartphones on-the-go, and lose their control later (Park & Lee, 2011). In such circumstance, addiction-like behaviors may emerge, adversely affect work productivity, and exacerbate personal or social problems. For instance, Turel, Serenko, and Bontis (2008) noted that Blackberry phones enable users to interact with their working environments anytime and anywhere. When users addictively use mobile email in their Blackberry phones, work overload and technology–family conflicts arise, and organizational commitment is reduced. Park and Lee (2014b) also indicated that users with smartphone addiction show higher scores for shyness, depression, and loneliness. Smartphone addiction, a specific form of information technology (IT) addiction, has been reported to be rather prevalent in recent years (King et al., 2013). In the US, half of the mobile customers are smartphone users, and their usage behaviors are fairly intensive (Vaghefi & Lapointe, 2014). Given these concerns, it becomes imperative for researchers to investigate why users become addicted to smartphones.

Despite increasing practical and theoretical concerns, the dark side of IT usage remains a relatively new issue in the information systems (IS) field (Cheung, Lee, & Lee, 2013). A majority of prior studies focus on positive aspects of IT usage (Tarafdar, Gupta, & Turel, 2013). In this respect, research on IT addiction (and certainly on smartphone addiction), continues to be scarce in the IS literature. Only a few recent studies shed light on smartphone addiction by showing its symptoms and negative consequences (e.g., Turel et al., 2008), and how it is identified through users' demographics or personal traits (Park & Lee, 2011). Much remains unclear regarding the driving forces behind smartphone addiction (Beranuy et al., 2009, Lapointe et al., 2013, Turel and Serenko, 2010). Consequently, this study attempts to develop a research model to explain smartphone addiction. The proposed model aims to achieve the two research objectives below to enrich the existing IS literature.

The first objective is to understand the key determinants of smartphone addiction. Drawing upon the functionalist perspective, we explain smartphone addiction from the influence of the underlying motives. Motives have been suggested as essential factors inducing addictive behavior (Lee and Park, 2014, Park, 2005). More specifically, four categories of motives of drinking (i.e., alcohol use and abuse) are applied to develop a framework of motives for our study. Previous non-IS research demonstrates that motives in these four categories result in both substance and IT addiction (e.g., Cooper, 1994, Hormes, 2016). We further identify specific motives in each category for our study based on prior research on IT addiction. The second objective is to highlight that the effects of motives may vary according to gender. Recent anecdotal evidence indicates that gender differences may exist with regard to the degree of addiction (Beranuy et al., 2009, Hong et al., 2012, Salehan and Negahban, 2013). However, minimal investigation has been conducted on how the driving forces of smartphone addiction vary across genders. In this respect, gender differences are important concerns given that prior studies have shown a lack of agreement on the effects of motives, such as social motive in Internet addiction (e.g., Khang et al., 2013, Li and Chung, 2006). Extending this line of studies, we attempt to explicate the roles of gender in a motive-based addiction model, thus augmenting awareness of smartphone addiction. We use the social orientation perspective to explain the moderating role of gender. Such perspective interprets the reason behind the difference of motives across genders. This perspective has been used to explain findings in prior studies which suggest that the impact of motives on IT usage differs based on gender (e.g., Bujarski et al., 2012, Chóliz, 2012). Additionally, gender differences have been reported in smartphone usage (Park & Lee, 2014a). Therefore, gender is likely to moderate the relations between motives and smartphone addiction. In summary, this study addresses two research questions:

  • 1.

    What are the important motives that may drive users' smartphone addiction?

  • 2.

    Do the influences of motives on smartphone addiction differ across genders?

To approach these questions, we will draw upon the functionalist and social orientation perspectives to develop our research model. We expect that our study will advance the knowledge of addictive behavior in smartphone usage. Our proposed model also provides insight into what motives trigger smartphone addiction and which ones are relatively more influential for users from both genders. The rest of this study is structured as follows. In the next section, the theoretical background is presented. Afterwards, we propose our research model and develop related hypotheses. Then, we discuss the research design of this study. Finally, we conclude our research with discussions on the findings, implications, limitations, and future opportunities.

Section snippets

IT addiction

In recent years, IT addiction has begun to attract considerable academic attention. This emerging concept is known as users' maladaptive dependency on the use of ITs and the obsessive–compulsive usage of ITs (Cheung et al., 2013, Vaghefi and Lapointe, 2013). Several forms of IT, such as the Internet and smartphones, provide various functions or services. For instance, smartphone functions vary from making calls to playing games. In such cases, a generalized perspective can be applied to

Research model and hypotheses

Drawing upon the theoretical background of this research, we develop a research model to explicate the determinants of smartphone addiction. We apply the four-category motive framework and identify a total of five smartphone motives from previous studies (Caplan, 2010, Khang et al., 2013, Turel et al., 2011a). We specifically use perceived enjoyment to denote the enhancement motive. Social relationship refers to the social motive. Mood regulation and pastime are treated as coping motives, and

Method

The present study aims to understand the predicting effects of motives and how they differ across genders in the context of smartphone addiction. To achieve these objectives, we conducted an empirical survey method to test the proposed hypotheses. Details are discussed as follows.

Data analysis and results

This study adopted partial least squares regression (PLS regression) to analyze the research model. PLS regression is a widely used technique for structural equation modeling in IS studies (Ahuja and Thatcher, 2005, Venkatesh and Morris, 2000). It requires a relatively small sample size without restriction on normal distribution (Hsu, Chang, & Chuang, 2015). We employed PLS regression and followed the two-step approach involving the measurement and the structural models (Hair, Tatham, Anderson,

Discussion and conclusion

In this study, we develop a research model to advance our limited knowledge of smartphone addiction. Our proposed model depicts the predicting effects of motives and highlights the interaction effects of gender from the functionalist and social orientation perspectives. Based on the theoretical background, this research model initially presents a four-category motivation framework to analyze motives and then assesses gender differences. An online survey with 384 usable data is administered to

Funding sources

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71671174) and the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project Nos. CityU 145912 and CityU 192513).

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