The Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale: An empirical investigation

By Larry D. Rosen, K. Whaling, L. Mark Carrier, Nancy A. Cheever, J. Rokkum. Computers in Human Behavior, 2013

704 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Communication, Information Systems and Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10623d2a3ecda855d77104accbdd5742ab4ddd82

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Citations in the corpus

ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA USE AND DEPRESSION AMONG U.S. YOUNG ADULTS (2016, background): “”[55] It may be valuable for future studies to use more fine-grained measures such as these.”
Examining online social brand engagement: a social presence theory perspective (2017, background): “Consequently, the increasing use of social media (e.g., amount of time and frequency of use) (Rosen et al., 2013) presents a good avenue for firms to engage with their customers.”
How Parents and Their Children Used Social Media and Technology at the Beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Associations with Anxiety (2020, neutral): “Participants responded to 20 items, derived from the literature 23,24 with study-speciﬁc adaptations, related to the use of technology for connection or coping.”
Effects of social media usage and social media multitasking on the academic performance of university students (2017, neutral): “As shown in Table 1, for the construct SMUNAP, four factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 were found instead of three as reported by Rosen et al. (2013).”
Out of sight is not out of mind: The impact of restricting wireless mobile device use on anxiety levels among low, moderate and high users (2014, methodology): “A series of nine questions assessed hours of daily WMD use (adapted from Rosen et al., 2013a; Rosen et al., 2013b ) including using the WMD to: go online and visit websites, send and receive e-mail, participate in instant message conversation or participate in online chats, talk on a telephone,…”