Abstract
The use of smartphones has become commonplace, even among people with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of smartphone use on the negative emotions of people with visual impairment. This study analyzed data from 30 respondents with visual impairments obtained from the 2016 Internet Overdependence Survey in South Korea. The analysis was based on partial least squares regression with information search, leisure, communication, and online transactions as independent variables, and negative emotions comprising depression, anxiety, and loneliness as the dependent variables. Among people with visual impairment, the use of smartphones as a means of communication decreased negative emotions while their use for leisure or information search was related to an increase in negative emotions such as depression and loneliness. Use for information retrieval was found to be associated with a low level of anxiety, and use for online transactions was associated with low loneliness. The results of this study showed that the use of the Internet can be a means of providing interaction opportunities and reducing negation emotions for people with visual impairment.
Highlights
According to a survey conducted in 2015, there are more than 1.5 billion smartphone users worldwide and, overall, more than 1 billion smartphones are estimated to have been sold (Demirci et al, 2015)
The explanatory power of the model constructed to determine the influence of smartphone use on the negative emotion of depression was 19.2%, which corresponds to the second potential factor
The models determining the effect of smartphone use on the negative emotions of depression and anxiety were analyzed based on the importance value of the second latent factor, while the model for loneliness was based on the importance value of third latent factor
Summary
According to a survey conducted in 2015, there are more than 1.5 billion smartphone users worldwide and, overall, more than 1 billion smartphones are estimated to have been sold (Demirci et al, 2015). Based on a survey conducted in South Korea, about 9 out of 10 people own a smartphone and the usage time is steadily increasing (Jeong et al, 2020). More than 2.23 billion people use Facebook monthly, and appear to share their thoughts on social issues and details of friends through this platform (Wiese et al, 2020). More than 90% of adults in the United States visit social media websites, and in the United Kingdom people spend an average of 136 min a day on social media; such people make social comparisons through their use of social network services (SNS) and their behavior is significantly influenced by these social comparisons (Oh et al, 2014).
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