Mobile News Adoption among Young Adults - Essay Example

Mobile news adoption among young adults: Examining the roles of perceptions, news consumption, and media usage The main objective of this study was to find out factor associated with mobile news adoption among young adults. The findings of this research demonstrates that mobile news consumption patterns as well as preferences and media usage of young adults play an important role in their adoption of mobile news. Moreover, the perceived relative advantage, utility and ease of use of mobile news are significantly associated with the adoption of mobile news. The methodological procedures of this study included conducting an online survey research. The researchers of this study set out to determine the consumption of mobile news by young adults aged between eighteen to twenty-four years. This study population is significant because at this time the young adults are in the process of developing their lasting consumption patterns and preferences. Moreover, it is vital to examine the consumption of medial news using this population group because they are the ones who interact more often with the latest technologies through information and entertainment. Young adults owns the latest mobile phones and use them to access information in the web. This age bracket is also the perfect one to base the study on as the majority of college students falls into this age bracket and are the one who uses the internet regularly. If this study used older people or children below 10 years it could not have yielded accurate results as this population group does not use the internet very much and does not own latest technology. However, by focusing on this age bracket that use the internet more often and are more comfortable with media news platforms makes this study limited. University students may be pushed by educational purposes to the internet, making them to use the internet more often than their age mates who are not in college. Moreover, they might have easier access to media technologies than this other group of their same age. Furthermore, this study just used a single age bracket instead of various age brackets. The usage of mobile news is not the same across various age brackets, some age groups may tend to use the internet more than the other. For example, this study could have divided the age groups into two: 16 years to 20 years and 21 years to 25 years. Therefore, generalizing the findings of this study to the entire age group or other population age groups is methodologically wrong. In addition, this study did not consider how respondents get news on their mobile phones. Nowadays, a lot of young adults are receiving news through public links on social media applications, such as twitter and Facebook and not on media platforms. The sample size for this research was large enough as it consisted of 384 students. This sample size is appropriate as it represents the whole population very well limiting the impact of outliers as well as extreme observation. Moreover, a large sample size is suitable to produce outcomes among variables which are significantly different. This research being a qualitative one, a large sample size widens the range of expected data and creates a good picture of analysis thereby reducing the probabilities of discovery failure. A large sample size reduces sampling error and hence ensure quality sampling and accurate statistical analysis of the data collected, yielding accurate results. This study set out to discover the perceptions of young adults as regards mobile news adoption and therefore having a large study sample makes it possible to find out all the perceptions which may be important. It is obvious that young adults have different perceptions concerning mobile news and hence a good sample size increases the likelihood of discovering a perception. The researchers recruited their study sample from the university database by use random sampling. Random sampling makes it easy to obtain a sample and gives each member an equal opportunity of being included in the sample. Therefore, it is a fair method for selecting a sample of the study. Moreover, the sample obtained from random sampling is more representative of the entire population and it allows for unbiased sample selection and hence, it can draw good conclusions as regards the population from the sample’s results. When a sample is representative it makes it reasonable to generalize the results obtained from the sample to the entire population. It was easy for the researchers to use random sampling since they could obtain a list of the total population of the university. One disadvantage of this method of sampling is high refusal rate as it is clear in this study as out of the 755 students that were contacted just 384 responded. This compromises the randomness of the sample. To collect data, the researchers used internet questionnaire as their instrument of research. There are several advantages of using questionnaire as a method of collecting data. Questionnaires are the best method to investigate users’ patterns, preferences, perspectives and ease of use of any given technology and thus it was suitable in this study. They are also more objective than interviews as they collect data in a standardized way. Moreover, they are generally easy to administer and they allow for a large sample size to be contacted at reasonably low cost. When respondents enter their own data online, it is electronically stored, making it available immediately for analysis. Questionnaires are also convenient for the respondent as they give them the freedom to answer question at their own time. Moreover, surveys allow for design flexibility as they can be programmed. Elaborate skip patterns and lucidity can be employed impeccably. Furthermore, questionnaires do not require an interviewer and hence respondent are more likely to reveal personal information that they cannot disclose directly to another individual. The disadvantages of using a questionnaire is include student unwillingness to answer some questions or reveal some information or they may think they are not benefiting in any way by responding to the questions. Moreover, they might answer the questions superficially particularly if the questionnaire is too long requiring more time to fill. Online surveys limit sampling and respondent accessibility since certain population may not have access to the internet. This may be the reason why out of 755 contacted students just 384 responded. The absence of an interviewer to probe and clarify things can result in unreliable data. To ensure the reliability and validity of the data collected, the authors first carried out a pretest of the questionnaire. Conducting a pretest helps find out flaws in questions and phrases that respondents are likely to misinterpret and hence make correction before administering the actual survey. A pretest can also held identify some question which most respondents are likely to skip due to some reasons and hence restructure it. The advantages of having a valid instrument of data collection far outweigh the expenses involved when carrying out a pretest and in this case being an online survey the costs would be in terms of extra time needed to conduct the pretest. Conducting a pretest allow the researcher to make necessary corrections, producing valid, reliable survey questionnaires that will collect accurate information for the research. Conducting a pretest really helped in reducing errors in questionnaires in this study as only 8 out of the 384 questionnaires that were administered were incomplete. The researchers come up with feasible research questions and answered them with clear variables. This study had several research questions requiring the researchers to use multiple variable measures so as to answer all these questions effectively. To obtain valuable evidence when analyzing survey data, it is critical to use multiple variable measures of every theoretical variables to be correlated and noting the patterns of relationship between every independent variables’ predictor and the dependent variable. The information of control variables including age, gender, level of education, marital status, ethnicity and household income were also collected. These patterns of relationships may help the researcher find out if the results are caused by a third factor or else if one or more of the predictors is invalid. Moreover, such information may indicate the need and give guideline for theoretical reformulation. This methodological procedure does not substitute other analysis methods in survey research rather it complements them. This study used multiple regression models to analyze its data. Multiple regression analysis helps the researcher to accurately predict the value of dependent variables given the values of multiple independent variables. The dependent variable for this study is the adoption of mobile news while the independent variables included perceived relative advantage, perceived usefulness of mobile news, and perceived ease of use of mobile news, news consumption levels and media usage level. The dependent variable is continuous while some of the independent variables are categorical and others continuous. Multiple regression models allow for flexibility whereby interaction between variables may be included and polynomial terms may also be incorporated. Multiple regression is more useful when R2 is close to 1 as this gives more precise prediction. Some of the values the R2 in this study were very low meaning some of the predictors were weak. However, most of the predictors were powerful ones in determining adoption of mobile news by young adults such as perceived relative advantage, ease of use of mobile news and utility. In conclusion, this study have been effective in establishing the factors which influence young adult adoption of mobile news, which include relative advantage, ease of use of mobile news and utility. The major strengths of this study include using a large sample size, random sampling, online survey questionnaire, feasible research questions and hypothesis, multiple variables, including control variables and multiple regression models. The major weakness included using a single age group and therefore generalizing the findings of this study to the other population age groups is methodologically wrong Read More