The purposes of this study are to understand the motivation, activeness, behavior and satisfaction of smart phone application users in South Korea and China through the theory of Use and Gratification , and to analyze the relationships between relevan...
The purposes of this study are to understand the motivation, activeness, behavior and satisfaction of smart phone application users in South Korea and China through the theory of Use and Gratification , and to analyze the relationships between relevant variables. In addition, it seeks to explore the similarities and differences between Korea, which has the higher rate of smart phone, and China, which would be the largest smart phone market in the world. A survey on the usage of smart phone applications was done on the university students in Korea and China. 647 responses were be collected and used for analysis.
In result, firstly, the motivations of smart phone applications were classified into 5 factors, which were named as socio-psychological, information acquisition, functional, entertainment, and convenient of use motivation. And it was verified that there were differences in usage depending on the types of users' motivation.
Secondly, the users' activeness was proved to be another important variable that has an effect on the usage of applications. Specifically, among the sub-concepts of activeness, the selection, the involvement and the evaluation while using the app were the factors that made the usage of applications different. In addition, by the regression analysis, it was found the users' motivation and usage of applications had great effects on satisfaction. Further, the information acquisition, functional convenience and convenient of use motivation were major factors to lead people to use app as practical and instrumental motivations. Among sub-variables of activeness, involvement had more influence on users' satisfaction than selection and evaluation. In another words, users' satisfactions are affected more while they were exposed to apps than before or after exposed to it.
Finally, in the comparison of the usage of the smart phone applications in Korea and China, some were found similar, while others were different. Generally the basic apps such as SMS and SNS were frequently used by the users of both country. However, Korea users installed more apps in smart phone and spent more time on apps than Chinese users, but Chinese users downloaded more paid apps than Korea users. Korea users spent much more time on instrumental apps such as the traffic information app, information searching app, and Chinese users prefer apps for games, entertainment and e-books.
This study investigated the usage of applications and the gratification among smart phone users in two countries. It provided some implications in theoretical and practical senses. It is appropriate and necessary to pay attention to the users activeness based on the U&G when studying smart media. This study can be used as a basic data when developing applications or exporting Korean applications to China, or for analysis the mobile environment with media ecological views.