Abstract:
Wireless devices especially mobile phones gained popularity among a wide variety of users because it gives communication freedom to individuals in their daily lives. Last century‟s reports show that behaviors and attitudes of users‟ especially young individuals are changing with the popularity of the mobile phones. Studies on social impacts of mobile phones had been scarce until a couple of years ago. Rather, past research on mobile phones examined engineering and policy aspects of the technology. In recent years, however, researchers started to turn attention to social aspects of cell phone diffusion and the impacts of cell phones had on people‟s daily lives and relationships. There are also open research areas in Turkey about the impacts of mobile phones on young users‟ attitudes and behaviors. Most of the past studies about impacts of cell phones on young generation were conducted in Scandinavian, European and Asian countries. In order to add one more study for Turkey perspective to the worldwide body of the literature, this study examines how young individuals‟ mobile phone behaviors change according to their demographic and cell phone usage characteristics, used mobile phone functionalities and social and psychological purposes of use. All of the characteristics in the research model that affect the user behavior are adapted from social science literature. Data are collected from 431 respondents with the purpose of probing attitudes and behavior of young mobile phone users in Turkey. The data have been analyzed via descriptive, reliability, cross-tab and cluster analysis in order to test 72 hypotheses in 4 main groups and draw conclusions therein. According to the findings, user behavior changes according to employment status and personal and parental education levels of young respondents. Young users, to whom the mobile phone has been given as a gift, pay less for monthly mobile usage. On the other hand, smart phone owners pay much more for their monthly mobile phone usage. In addition to this, as parallel to the mobile phone ownership duration, monthly paid amount for mobile is ascending. Young Avea customers pay less and feel less satisfied but Turkcell customers pay much more and feel more satisfied. Furthermore, mobile phone functionality addicted young customers pay much more monthly for mobile usage. Lastly, social and psychological mobile phone dependency level of respondents affects the young users' behavior during the time of the day.
