With the increasingly frequent appearance of mobile phones in college classrooms, there have been growing concerns regarding their negative aspects including distractive off-task multitasking. In this work, we design and evaluate Let’s FOCUS, a software-based intervention service that assists college students in self-regulating their mobile phone use in classrooms. Our preliminary survey study (with 47 professors and 283 students) reveals that it is critical to encourage voluntary participation by framing intervention as a learning tool and to raise awareness regarding appropriate mobile phone usage by establishing social norms in colleges. Let’s FOCUS introduces a virtual limiting space for each class (or a virtual classroom) where the students can explicitly restrict their mobile phone use voluntarily. Furthermore, it promotes students’ willing participation by leveraging social facilitation and context-aware reminders associated with virtual classrooms. We conducted a campus-wide campaign for approximately six weeks to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The results confirm that 379 students used the app to limit 9,335 hours of mobile phone usage over 233 classrooms. Let’s FOCUS was used in diverse learning contexts and for different purposes and its social learning and context-awareness features significantly motivated prolonged participation. We present the design considerations of software-based intervention.
Many people often experience difficulties in achieving behavioral goals related to smartphone use. Most of prior studies approached this problem with various behavior change strategies such as self-reflection and social support. However, little is known about the effectiveness and user experiences of restrictive and coercive interventions such as blocking. In this work, we developed "GoalKeeper," a smartphone intervention app that locks the user into the self-defined daily use time limit with restrictive intervention mechanisms. We conducted a four-week field experiment with 36 participants to investigate the effects and user experiences of varying intensities of restrictive interventions. The results showed that restrictive mechanisms are more effective than non-restrictive mechanisms such as warning. However, we found that restrictive mechanisms caused more frustration and pressure to the users, mainly due to diversity of usage contexts and needs. Based on our study results, we extracted practical implications for designing restrictive mechanisms that balance the intervention effectiveness for behavioral changes and the flexibility for user acceptability.
This study aimed to investigate transitions in patterns of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and psychological distress among South Koreans with traumatic experiences. This study consists of two parts: In Part 1 the time since trauma ranged between 0 and 41 years, while in Part 2 participants experienced at least one traumatic event within the previous three years. We identified subgroups and transitions between classes over a one‐year period using latent profile analysis and latent transition analysis. First, in Part 1, four classes were identified at T1 and T2. Second, we explored whether age, sex, time since trauma, and time perspective (TP) predicted class membership at T1. Age, past‐negative (PN), present‐fatalistic, and future TPs were significant predictors of class membership at T1. Finally, sex, PN, and future TPs were identified as significant predictors of class transition over time. The same analysis was conducted in Part 2 with individuals chosen from the Part 1 participants. Differential effects of TP on class membership and transitions in PTSD symptoms and psychological distress indicated the need for intervention programs that consider the TP profiles of individuals with traumatic experiences.
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