excessive use of mobile phones is known to occur among
youth under the age of 20 years, the term “phone dependency”
is often used to describe the negative effects of mobile
phone usage on adolescents(Niwa 2005).
Individuals have their own patterns of phone usage.
Some people mainly use mobile phones to communicate by
voice, others prefer text message exchanges, and still others
consider phones to be gadgets for the primary purposes of
playing games, watching videos, and surfing the Internet.
Previous studies have shown that phone usage patterns are
associated with mobile phone dependency(Lu, Watanabe,
Liu, Uji, Shono and Kitamura 2011). Some particular phone
usage patterns significantly extend the hours of phone usage
by individuals, which may lead to excessive mobile
usage, whereas other usage patterns do not. East Asian adolescents,
like anyone else, have their own preferred phone
usage patterns. Because the usage patterns of East Asian
adolescents are presumably influenced by their preferred
phone functions, the patterns are important to understand in
order to explain mobile phone dependency among adolescents.
Phone usage patterns differ in terms of the sociodemographic factors of users, including age and gender,
which suggests that the phone usage patterns of adolescents
are different from the patterns of other age populations of
users. Thus, this study examines the observed mobile phone
usage and their associations with mobile phone dependency