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Item Theorising Mobile Technology Addiction: Evidence From A Developing Country Context(University Of Ghana, 2023-02) Nyamadi, M.Several unprecedented benefits of mobile technology have been realised globally. In developing countries, this seemingly ubiquitous technology has created socio-economic impacts, including post-economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this promise, there are unintended consequences which tend to threaten the social behaviour of its mobile adopters or users and thereby have the potential of marring the sustainability of its benefits. Mobile technology addiction (MTA) is one of the unintended consequences of adopting and using this mobile technology that requires attention. Operationally, MTA is defined as a non-chemical (behavioural) addiction which involves human-technology interaction. The urgency of the attention is echoed in the 5th edition of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, attempts to address this urgency in literature face four main research gaps. The first gap is the lack of a multidisciplinary and stakeholders’ understanding of MTA from a developing country context. The second gap is the lack of theorisation in research that recourse is drawn from a socio-technical perspective per the multifaceted nature of mobile technologies. Currently, no socio-technical theorisation exists in the literature. The third gap is the lack of theorising the moderating effects of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and self-regulation in one study since they are the two main moderators with opposing effects. The relationship between MTA and its outcome is either strengthened or weakened by these two moderators. The fourth gap is that developing countries are less represented in literature. The Global Mobile Economy data reports that 5.3 billion people subscribed to mobile services globally as of 2021. The future growth is estimated to be driven by younger people from developing countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). MTA is a threat to this potential growth and needs urgent attention. A study among young people in universities with a higher potential for meaningful use of mobile technology from a developing country context is needed. This study consolidates the Technology Acceptance Model 3 (TAM3) and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 3 (UTAUT3), Flow Theory, and Stimulus Organism Response (S-O-R) Framework to address the gaps in the literature. The combination of these theories addresses the weaknesses in the existing literature that sought to theorise MTA (particularly smartphones and tablets) from either a social or technical perspective. Adoption theories (i.e., TAM3 and UTAUT3) present MTA's technological dimension. The flow theory describes how the interaction between users and mobile technologies leads to flow and triggers MTA. The S-O-R framework explains how a stimulus (user attributes and technology attributes) leads to the organism (social presence, flow and telepresence) and triggers a response (MTA and negative consequences). This study is conducted from a critical realism perspective using a mixed methodology. It uses a survey of 528 respondents for the quantitative and a multi-case study approach for the qualitative. Structure Equation Modelling (Smart Partial Least Square) is used for the quantitative and thematic content analyses for the qualitative. The above approaches and methods present a comprehensive view of MTA, enabling qualitative data and results to provide rich explanations for the quantitative findings. The first objective is to understand from multidisciplinary and stakeholders’ perspectives the nature and causes of technology addiction in a developing country context. The findings from Ghana suggest a multiplicity of perspectives by professional practice or experiential knowledge from health-related disciplines (i.e., psychiatry, psychology, nursing and medicine). They describe MTA as a mental health disease which involves users' over-dependence on mobile technology despite harmful consequences. Even among healthcare professionals, differences exist per their practice. Neuroscientists describe MTA as an altered brain condition where the brain can get into a state of uncontrollability toward external stimuli like mobile phones and their contents. Religious leaders in Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council (GPCC) describe MTA as a sickness caused by strange spirits. Technology developers described MTA as a technological disorder caused by ubiquitous, communicative, responsive, flexible, and attractive multimedia interfaces of mobiles, which enable users to engage in online social behaviours that lead to addiction. Finally, the definition deduced and agreed upon by all stakeholders for MTA is a chronic brain condition where one feels preoccupied with an uncoerced compulsion to repeat or continue using mobile technology with severe negative consequences or outcomes. The process of addiction is divided into four stages, experimental use, regular use, abusive use and addictive/dependence use (see Fig 8.6). The second objective is to explain how the socio-technical interaction between users (university students) and mobile technology leads to mobile technology addiction. This study posits that users must be motivated by their self-traits, hedonic and utilitarian values to be socially connected to mobile technology, thus social presence. Mobile technologies must have usability and interactivity attributes to aid telepresence. The interaction between social presence and telepresence results in flow, which predicts MTA. This study explained the concept of flow as the result of users’ interest, abilities, and skills to effectively use mobile technologies that have immersive capabilities to result in total immersion and absorption to the extent that the user may eventually lose control of time and immediate environment which result in addiction, for the detailed structures and mechanisms that trigger MTA (see Fig 9.1). The third objective is to explore the moderating effects of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and Self-Regulation. This research found that FoMO intensifies the relationship between MTA and their outcomes, while self-regulation weakens the relationship between MTA and their outcomes. Therefore, if FoMO is intensified, the relationship between MTA and its impact on academic performance and/or well-being is increased negatively. However, if self-regulation is enhanced, the relationship between MTA and its impact on academic performance and well- being is weakened. This study conceptualised FoMO and self-regulation as IS Use Regulation moderating construct in the final MTA Model (see Fig.9.2). The fourth objective is to investigate and explain the effect of mobile technology addictions on university students’ academic performance and well-being in a developing country context. This study found that MTA significantly predicted negative academic performance. The qualitative findings explain the negative effects of academic performance as school abandonment, playing truancy, phubbing, and learning table disruptions and on well-being as mental health disorders, relationship complications, emotional and psychological instability and impaired social behaviour. This study contributes to research, theory, policy and practice. First, this research describes MTA and presents its nature and causes from a multidisciplinary and stakeholder perspective. It discovers the stages in the process of addiction and reveals the socio-technical structures and mechanisms that trigger MTA and its impact on outcomes. This research contributes to theory by extending flow theory from the original four (4) dimensions to five (5) dimensions. It hypothesised and empirically tested presence as the fifth dimension and found it to be significant (see Table 6.7). For contribution to the S-O-R framework, this study proposed new constructs for stimulus (user attributes and technology attributes), organism (flow) and response (MTA and negative consequences), which is a unique way of applying it in literature (see Fig 9.2). Finally, this study develops an MTA framework and model from a socio-technical perspective which could be equally used to study other forms of addictions. Per the findings, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers must start thinking about developing design principles and artefacts to regulate, block and mitigate MTA. This study proposes that MTA interventions should be regulatory, market-based and voluntary. The contributions have been published in two (2) book chapters and three (3) conference articles. The three journal articles are currently being worked on for publication in three leading information systems journals.Item Large Deviations of the Throughput in Multi-Channel Medium-Access Protocols(University Of Ghana, 2022-04) Kwofie, C.This thesis considers Aloha and slotted Aloha protocols as medium access rules for a multichannel message delivery system. Users decide randomly and independently with a minimal amount of knowledge about the system at random times to make a sending attempt. The system has a fixed number of available channels; equivalently, interference constraints make the delivery of too many messages at a time impossible. We derive probabilistic formulas for the most important quantities like the number of successfully delivered messages and the number of sending attempts, and we derive large-deviation principles for these quantities in the limit of many participants and many sending attempts. We analyse the rate functions and their minimizers and derive laws of large numbers. In particular, we are interested in questions like “if the number of successfully delivered messages is significantly lower than the expectation, was the reason that too many or too few sending attempts were made?”. The main tools are from the theory of large deviations.Item Statistical Modelling of Birth Spacing and Reproductive Health of Married Women From Gomoa East District in the Central Region of Ghana: A Survival Analysis Approach(University of Ghana, 2015-06) Turkson, E.H.; Nsowah-Nuamah, N. N. N.; Nortey, E.N. N.; Iddi, S.; University of Ghana, College of Basic and Applied Sciences, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, department of StatisticsThe objective of this research is to apply appropriate statistical techniques to model the length of time to successive births (birth spacing) within the reproductive health of mothers and identify the socio-demographic and sociocultural factors that cause variation in the length of birth interval. The data used in this study were collected using questionnaire from Gomoa East District 2014, where multi-stage cluster sampling was used as the sampling design. The clusters were defined as small enumeration areas (EAs) and it was assumed that birth intervals for the women in the same cluster (children) were correlated because they share the same environment. This study used: Conventional Methods (Cox regression), Acceleration Failure Time (AFT); Exponential, Weibull, Log-logistic Lognormal Frailty modelling techniques. In the analysis, the covariates mother's age at first birth, mother's educational level, birth experience, and survival status of the index child were found to have significant effect on the length of birth interval for Gomoa East women. The observations within specific women were found to be correlated and the Cox's proportional hazards model was used to underestimate the standard errors of the parameter estimates. The analysis with the frailty model showd that parity may not be an important covariate for analyzing birth intervals, especially when mother's age at birth is already in the model.