Salient indicators of mobile instant messaging addiction with selected socio-demographic attributes among tertiary students in South Africa

Abstract

The scholarship of addiction has metamorphosed over the years with a trajectory of social psychology studies focusing on technology-based addictions. Relatedly, the nascency of mobile messenger applications has not left the South African student community with immunity from the problematic and psychological effects of excessive reliance on mobile technology. An adoption of the Internet addiction test led to the identification of four factors, namely, withdrawal, compulsion, control disorder, and lifestyle disturbance as the underlying indicators of addictive tendencies among tertiary students. Analysis of variance was performed with Dunnette and Scheffe post hoc tests with a view to identifying possible existence of statistically significant differences among selected biographic variables. While gender had been shown to be a predictor of mobile messaging overuse in past studies, no gender differences were established in this study. Significant differences were noted with age and academic programme (specifically, engineering and social sciences). These results could have implications on the future development of novel, mobile software applications with discipline-specific and age-appropriate usability functions. It should also be noted that mobile phones are becoming more varied in their use, and new messaging applications appear to be more attractive to selected demographic segments rather than others.