The Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale: An empirical investigation
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Within academic settings, technological diversions such as text messaging, scrolling, and task switching reduce students' attention span to about 6 minutes.
“Within academic settings, students' concentration is disrupted by technological diversions such as text messaging, scrolling, and the switching between digital tasks on various screens, resulting in a reduction of their attention span to a mere 6 minutes (Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, and Rokkum, 2013).”
From SCROLLING AND SUSTAINED ATTENTION: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE SUSTAINED ATTENTION OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS (2024) · cites this paper as Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, and Rokkum, 2013
Section 1.3 reports that students and office workers often switched tasks because of technological prompts such as texts, email, or social-network checks. Section 3.4 links a preference for task switching with greater technology use. Neither passage establishes that these diversions reduce students’ attention span to six minutes, or measures that effect in academic settings. (LLM, conf=0.88)
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- Authors
- Rosen, L. D., Whaling, K., Carrier, L. M., Cheever, N. A., & Rokkum, J.
- Affiliations
- California State University, Dominguez Hills (US)
- Corresponding author
- Rosen, L.D.
- Venue
- Computers in Human Behavior
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2013-11
- Volume
- 29
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 2501-2511
- ISSN
- 0747-5632 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4338964
- OpenAlex
- W2144724817
- Cited by
- 788
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 96 · 2025: 106 · 2024: 82 · 2023: 84 · 2022: 82 · 2021: 83 · 2020: 74 · 2019: 48 · 2018: 50 · 2017: 38 · 2016: 19 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 10
- FWCI
- 42.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Computers in Human Behavior (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T34GM008683, R25GM062252)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Impact of Technology on Adolescents
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender and Technology in Education
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
- Keywords
- attitudes toward technology, smartphone use, social media use, web search, media sharing, text messaging, video gaming, online friendship, television viewing, technology anxiety, technology dependence, task switching, internet addiction, scale development
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