• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.27
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• pp.247-282
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• 2004

The purpose of this study is to examine the mobile phone service usage patterns of Korean teenagers and their motivation to use it, and to explore the relationships between the teenagers' social-psychological characteristics and their trails of mobile phone usage. After reviewing prior theoretical studios, three hypotheses regarding the research questions shown above were generated. Questionnaire study was conducted with 400 high school students in Busan and Ulsan metropolitan areas. They were to answer three categories of questions, such as frequencies of voice calls and text messaging services and the other mobile services, questions asking their social-psychological characteristics, and their motivations for using mobile phone services. Findings show that the teenagers more likely to tend to use voice calls when communicating family members. They tend to avoid those services with high rate of use as multimedia, game, and broadcasting services via mobile phones. The teenagers use mobile phone services for the similar purposes to conventional telephone uses. Therefore, the classical theories showing the alternative purposes or motivations to use conventional telephone usage, which divided the main purposes for phone uses in to two; work/instrumental and socializing/entertaining, proved to be reasonable. The cheap messaging services with texts are popular among the teenagers and are used for socializing/entertaining purposes rather than instrumental/functional purposes. In addition, the teenagers' social-psychological characteristicss are significantly associated with the amount of mobile phone uses. A characteristic of "individual-centeredness" is positively related with non-voice service uses, while "group-centeredness" explains heavy amount of using voice calls and text messaging services. Such characteristics as "immediacy," "directness," "innovativeness," and "other-direction" are positively associated with the frequencies and amounts of mobile phone uses, while "inner-direction" and "tradition-direction" are negatively correlated.