Uses, Gratifications, and Addiction of Social Media
This chapter discusses social media addiction among adolescents in urban China from the U&G perspectives. Specifically, it covers social media penetration among adolescents in urban China, the gratifications adolescents obtained from social media use,
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Uses, Gratifications, and Addiction of Social Media
This chapter discusses social media addiction among adolescents in urban China from the U&G perspectives. Specifically, it covers social media penetration among adolescents in urban China, the gratifications adolescents obtained from social media use, the severity of social media addiction among adolescents in urban China, and social media addiction symptoms the adolescents experience. Moreover, the chapter elaborates on the relationships of social media addiction relative to the level of social media use, gratifications, and parental control.
4.1
Social Media Penetrations Among Adolescents in Urban China
RQ1 asked the degree to which adolescents in urban China use social media including IM, SNS, blogs, and microblogs. To answer this research question, adolescents were asked to indicate their level of use of IM, SNS, blogs, and microblogs in terms of the time spent daily on each medium on average and the number of friends they had on a specific medium. Tables 4.1 and 4.2 show the frequency of use and the number of friends the adolescents had on each social medium, respectively. IM indeed ranked as the most popular social medium among adolescents, with 90 % of the respondents reporting that they were IM users. The survey questionnaire emphasized that the usage time meant the active use time, which excluded idle time when IM applications remained in the background and not in active use. Nearly 30 % of the respondents indicated that they used IM more than 1 h every day, and 10.4 % reported using it more than 3 h a day. These data reflect heavy use of IM by some of the adolescents. As for the total number of friends on IM, 45 % of the respondents reported more than 100 friends on IM. However, 90 % of the respondents had fewer than 50 frequent contact friends on IM. This indicates that while adolescents may have a large number of casual IM friends, they may often limit IM communication to certain intimate friends. The category means for daily IM use, H. Huang, Social Media Generation in Urban China: A Study of Social Media Use and Addiction among Adolescents, Understanding China, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45441-7_4, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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Uses, Gratifications, and Addiction of Social Media
Table 4.1 Frequency of daily social media use Daily use Users 1. No use 2. < than 15 min 3. 15–29 min 4. 30–59 min 5. 60–119 min 6. 120–179 min 7. ≧180 min Category Mean Note: N = 1,549
IM (%) 90.0 10.0 24.5 17.8 18.0 13.6 5.5 10.4 3.59
SNS Overall (%) 51.3 48.7 20.5 13.8 8.3 5.3 1.3 2.0 2.13
Game (%) 48.2 51.8 27.3 12.1 5.8 1.3 0.5 1.2 1.84
Blogs Writing (%) 44.4 55.6 23.2 10.6 7.4 2.3 0.4 0.5 1.81
Reading (%) 65.6 34.4 31.5 19.1 10.2 3.5 0.8 0.5 2.21
Microblogs (%) 40.4 59.6 17.9 10.1 6.3 3.5 1.0 1.5 1.85
Table 4.2 Number of friends on social media IM Total friends (%) 1. 0–10 9.8 2. 11–30 9.6 3. 31–50 14.3 4. 51–100 21.4 5. 101–150 16.3 6. 151–200 10.5 7. > 200 18.0 Category 4.28 Mean Note: N = 1,549
SNS Frequent contact friends (%) 42.0 36.
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