Abstract
The development of the mobile industry makes it necessary for scholars to study mobile user behaviors in the mainland of China. This article is divided into three main parts after a brief introduction of the current Chinese mobile phone market. The first part is to demonstrate mobile use and its influencing factors in the mainland of China, and then to determine the mostly studied mobile usages among those articles. The second part pays attention to the effect brought by the use of mobile phones, and then checks the relationship between mobile addiction and other social behaviors. The last part is to illustrate the methods employed in the mobile user behavior analysis. After stating the analysis process of user behaviors, the authors attempted to summarize the main features extracted from data mining technology. Finally, the authors put forward some possible directions under the topic of mobile user behavior after careful review of the related literature.
TopOverview
According to the literature we reviewed, we discovered that the first paper that concerned about the relationship between mobile users and mobile phones in China may be the one entitled “Psychology development of college students’ phone addiction” by Han and Qi (2005).
In this paper, Han firstly defined the mobile phone dependence or addition as mental disorder and uncomfortable feelings caused by exceeding use of mobile phones. Five main behaviors that caused by mobile addiction were summarized in his study. Then, Han attempted to explain the psychological causes of mobile phone addiction and how it affects college students’ lives. By giving the psychological need of mobile phones, they illustrated the disadvantages of mobile phone addiction.
The later studies extended Han’s contributions to a wide scope, not only in the field of mobile addiction but also the field of mobile regular use behaviors and mobile user behavior analysis.
Chen & Tang (2006) initiatively introduced the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model to the field of mobile payment acceptance and usage and examined the key factors of mobile payment user behaviors. Moreover, they concluded that the social influence positively correlated to the use of mobile payment. Thereafter, many scholars applied those models to some other fields such as mobile commence and mobile banking (Ren, 2007; Zeng, 2009; Zhou et al., 2010).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Influencing Factors: The influencing factors are those factors that can affect some features of target object. Influencing factors can be used as control variables to determine the key influencing factors of an object. In the field of mobile phone behavior analysis, influencing factors mainly include demographic factors, geographical factors, and psychological factors.
User Behavior: The definitions of user behavior are various in different areas. In the field of mobile device research, the user behavior can be concreted to user data collected from mobile phone users when they use services provided by mobile phones. Those data can be used to reflect the user behavior in turn.
Mobile Addiction: Mobile addiction is defined as chronic or periodic obsessions caused by repeated use of mobile phones, which may lead to intense and sustained demand and reliance. It is a typical example of improper use of mobile phones.
Data Mining: Data mining is an efficient method to process large-scale data and has become a widely used technique in behavior analysis. By data mining, researchers can extract some useful features from massive data. When applied to mobile user behavior analysis, data mining can be helpful in extracting features such as preferences by using the data collected in mobile phones.
Mobile Phone Use: Mobile phone use mainly focus on how people use mobile phone services and functions. It may be quantified as frequency and time of using a specified service.
Behavior Analysis: Behavior analysis in mobile phone research is to use data collected from mobile phone users to determine preferences or psychological states of users. Questionnaires are the traditional method to obtain analysis data. With the development of smartphones, researchers can use data of mobile phone usage to complete behavior analysis.