Motives for Smartphone Use as Predictors of Absent Presence Situations among University Students in Pakistan

Journal of Media Studies, Vol 38, No 1 (2023)

Motives for Smartphone Use as Predictors of Absent Presence Situations among University Students in Pakistan

Robina Saeed, Mudassar Hussain, Sumera Batool

Abstract

The smartphone is becoming the most useable medium in recent history because of the 24/7 access, portability, revenues spent for the sale of this technology and the availability of multiple applications converged in this single palm top. The current study contributes to the notions of absent presence and mere presence hypothesis and a theoretical framework is proposed. The objectives are to explore the effects of the independent variables of political, business, educational, religious, communication, companionship, social interaction, passing time, escapist, relaxation, and entertainment motives for smartphone usage on the dependent variable of perceived absent presence situations among youth. The population for the study is the youth of Pakistan. By using quota sampling technique university students are selected from the four provinces of Pakistan (N=756). The online questionnaire is used for the analysis of data. Multiple regressions are applied to explain the results. The independent variables explain the variance of 45.5 percent in the dependent variable of absent presence situations which is quite respectable. The companionship and passing time motives make unique contributions to absence presence situations. The use of smartphones for finding companions and passing time are leading university students to less engagement in offline communication where they ignore the people around them. It is recommended to parents be friends with their adult children to know their preferences online. The parents will have to be media literate to be with their adult children. The students also should check their time for smartphone use and pay attention to their studies which is their prime objective. It is also suggested to replicate the model in different cultural settings with different samples for validity confirmation.

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Institute of Communication Studies
University of the Punjab, Quaid-e-Azam Campus, Lahore - 54590, Pakistan.

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