A study of mobile phone using behaviors among Hong Kong adolescents

Mobile phone has once been an expensive technological device that would be affordable for only a few. Today, with a substantial decrease in the cost of hardware procurement (the mobile phone and its accessories) and network connection (perhaps due to a keen competition among service providers arising from the open policy of the government), it becomes almost an indispensable belonging for many Hong Kong people. Many secondary schools in Hong Kong nowadays are making use of this new technology in various processes of teaching and learning. Though smart use of this new technology can bring in a number of benefits to our students (e.g. boosting up learning motivation, enhancing students’ engagement in the learning process), maladaptive use of it might lead to undesirable consequences on its users (e.g. impaired physical and/or psychological functioning, poor academic performance, poor relationships with peers and/or family members). Using a self-report measuring instrument of problematic mobile phone use (the Problematic Cellular Phone Use Questionnaire, Yen et al., 2009) and collecting data with a sample of senior secondary students, prevalence of problematic mobile phone among this sample of school adolescents were examined. Comparison between prevalence of problematic mobile phone use among the present sample of respondents with previous studies adopting the same measuring instrument could shed some light on severity of this emerging type of technology-related dependence among school adolescents. Moreover, correlates of problematic mobile phone use were also examined. Implications for identifying who may be benefited from and who are likely to be suffered from this new technological device are discussed.