Predicting the Relationship between Students’ Addiction Behaviors to Cellar Phones and Their Demographic and Psychological Characteristics of Shahrkord Universities

Abstract

Introduction: The cellar phone technologies are the most important invention in human life history, because of the easy of using them in different aspects, people of both groups in developed and developing countries are using them. In addition, of the positive effects of this technology on different aspects of people lives, they had negative effects such as head ache, disorders in user’s behavior’s such as psychological side effects that are mentioned in different articles by a variety of methods that are used by researchers. The little research has been done to this point that these new technologies do not have equal effects on all people the same, because of different characteristics of audiences such as different cultures and social backgrounds and also according to their mental health and psychological traits. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of demographic and psychological characteristics of students on their addictions to cellar phone among Shahrkord Universities’ students.  Material and Methods: The present research was an applied and descriptive one, because the results could be used for planners and policy makers of the media areas. The research method was survey and correlation type. Statistical population included all students of different universities from SharKord city (including Payam Noor, Azad and Medical Sciences faculties’ members). 297 students were selected randomly from the total students according to their proportion in the population. One questionnaire with 3 sections were used for gathering data: 1) self-made questionnaire for providing the demographic information such as gender, marriage status, age, , university type, economic and social status, living address, university disciplines, access to technologies, the rate and kind of using cellar. 2) Hooper, & Zhou’s questionnaire (2007) with 32 items for measuring the 6 addiction levels of cellar phone instruments such as: habitual behaviors, intentional, dependence, compulsive and addictive behaviors of mobile users. Section 3 of the questionnaire included questions related to students’ psychological traits such as physical complements, obsessive compulsive, paranoid behaviors, anxiety, phobia, depression. These traits were measured by SCL-90 questionnaire .Analyzing data was done by SPSS software. Two types of statistics analysis were used: in descriptive ones; frequencies, percentages, means were used and in inferential statistics we used One way of variance analysis and X2, LSD. Discussions of Results & Conclusions: Results indicated that there were no relationship between students’ addictive cellar phone behaviors and demographic information such as: genders, university type, living address and their disciplines. But there was a relation between students’ habitual behaviors for cellar phone usage with their married status of students. The attained results are in the same line as researches were done by Marlo (2009), Pawlowska & Potembska, (2011) and Takao (2013). Single persons used mobile settings for different purposes more than married ones. One reason may be that singles have more free time for spending with their friends in two forms of virtual and real time. The other main results were that there were also relations between students’ addiction to cellar phone with their psychological status, especially with patients with Paranoid and obsessive compulsive behaviors. The people with obsessive compulsive behaviors use cellar phones more than other groups, because they avoid from presence in society and they prefer to touch with their friends by mobile phones. The other group are paranoid disorder people who use mobile phones less than other people because they have suspect thoughts. The results of the present study are in line with other research that indicate addiction to mobile settings are related to the psychological traits such as social anxiety and nervousness, and personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism. We conclude that we can control the addiction to cellar phone addiction by treating the psychological traits of users.

Keywords

• Cellar phone
• Addiction
• behavior
• University