Computers, Internet and Smartphone Attitudes Among Romanian University Students

Abstract

Higher education institutions encourage the use of computers and of the internet for accessing content, assignments, exam results and collaborative learning work. Our study focuses on the university students’ attitudes towards the use of computers, internet and smartphones in relationship with the field of studies, age, gender, academic performance. The research is a descriptive and correlational one. The participants were 685 female and male university students, enrolled in Sciences and Humanities, distributed in two studies which conducted at a distance of four years. The instruments used were the following: CARS, (Heinssen, Glass, - Knight, 1987), the IAS (Nickel and Pinto (1986), CAS (Compeau, - Higgins, 1995), some scales of MTUAS ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "ISSN" : "0747-5632", "PMID" : "25722534", "abstract" : "Current approaches to measuring people's everyday usage of technology-based media and other computer-related activities have proved to be problematic as they use varied outcome measures, fail to measure behavior in a broad range of technology-related domains and do not take into account recently developed types of technology including smartphones. In the present study, a wide variety of items, covering a range of up-to-date technology and media usage behaviors. Sixty-six items concerning technology and media usage, along with 18 additional items assessing attitudes toward technology, were administered to two independent samples of individuals, comprising 942 participants. Factor analyses were used to create 11 usage subscales representing smartphone usage, general social media usage, Internet searching, e-mailing, media sharing, text messaging, video gaming, online friendships, Facebook friendships, phone calling, and watching television in addition to four attitude-based subscales: positive attitudes, negative attitudes, technological anxiety/dependence, and attitudes toward task-switching. All subscales showed strong reliabilities and relationships between the subscales and pre-existing measures of daily media usage and Internet addiction were as predicted. Given the reliability and validity results, the new Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale was suggested as a method of measuring media and technology involvement across a variety of types of research studies either as a single 60-item scale or any subset of the 15 subscales.", "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Rosen", "given" : "L D", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Whaling", "given" : "K", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Carrier", "given" : "L M", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Cheever", "given" : "N A", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Rokkum", "given" : "J", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "Computers in human behavior", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issue" : "6", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2013", "11", "1" ] ] }, "page" : "2501-2511", "publisher" : "NIH Public Access", "title" : "The Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale: An empirical investigation.", "type" : "article-journal", "volume" : "29" }, "uris" : [ "http://www.mendeley.com/documents/?uuid=61676b79-6d78-39cc-84fd-a029b36d7adf" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "formattedCitation" : "(Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, - Rokkum, 2013)", "plainTextFormattedCitation" : "(Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, - Rokkum, 2013)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, - Rokkum, 2013)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, - Rokkum, 2013) and of USLS (Rung, Wranke, and Mattheos, 2014). The results showed significant differences between male and female students concerning the use and attitudes towards computers, internet and smartphones. But the self-efficacy is the same with males and females, conventional and nonconventional students, respectively. The positive and negative attitudes and task switching are equal for the two genders, and the academic performance is associated with a part of the activities performed on Facebook. The findings are discussed in connection with the learning situations, the multitasking tendencies and the use of technologies for social and private activities.