A longitudinal study on smartphone use in Hong Kong

Abstract

Smartphone use has become our daily habit. However, we are unfamiliar with how people use their smartphone and its development. This study aims to understand the change of smartphone use over a year, which developed a tailor-made smartphone app by new data collection method. It provided an alternative platform for a mass number of researchers to simply observe and record smartphone use of the public. A longitudinal study could be conducted using the data collected to compare the changes of patterns of smartphone use. Three stages of data collection were conducted in summer 2016 (1265 data set), winter 2017 (3780 data set), and summer 2017 (3883 data set) in Hong Kong. The results showed that significant relationships were found between smartphone use and gender, and between smartphone use and weekday. The trend of smartphone use from 2016 to 2017 was discussed, including the increasing domination of instant message, the important role of audio function, the augmentation of female’s social networking behavior, and the diversifying communication pattern during weekend. The study suggests sharing the raw data for every researcher to analyze in their own way.