Background:
Problematic smartphone use is widespread, and college-age youth faces an especially high risk of its associated consequences. While a promising body of research has emerged in recent ...years in this area, the domination of quantitative inquiries can be fruitfully and conceptually complemented by perspectives informed through qualitative research. Toward that end, this study aimed to interrogate the myriad behavioral, attitudinal, and psychological tendencies as a side effect of college students’ engagement with the smartphone in their everyday lived experience through in-depth interviews.
Methods:
We recruited 70 participants from seven college campuses hailing from different geographic regions in China, and conducted semi-structured in-depth virtual interviews via WeChat in November and December 2020. Subjective experiences, personal narratives and individual perceptions in the context of routine interaction with the smartphone were thematically analyzed through a reiterative process in an effort to detect prevailing threads and recurring subthemes.
Results:
The smartphone has established a pervasive presence in college students’ everyday life. Time-based use characteristics generated a typology of four distinct user groups: hypo-connected antagonists, balanced majority, hyper-connected enthusiasts, and indulgent zealots. Habitual usage falls on predictable patterns matched onto temporal, locale-based and contextual cues and triggers. Students’ dependency relationships with the smartphone have both functional and emotional dimensions, as prominently manifested in occasions of detachment from the device. Self-regulatory effort in monitoring and limiting use is significantly impacted by mental focus and personal goal setting. Perspectives from our qualitative data suggest the need for taking into account a variety of contextual cues and situational factors in dissecting psychological and emotional outcomes of smartphone use and abuse.
•The framework of mobilities and health is used to explain the multi-dimensional health consequences of frequent business travel.•Perceptions of health impacts vary among respondents with different ...travel pattern and personal situations.•With longer experiences, travelers are more aware about the potential health cost but health impairment has been accumulated.•Public glamorization of business travel needs to be changed.
Business travel as a form of work-related mobility has been an integrated part of working life in the global economy, generating great impact on individuals. Although prior studies address some relevant health consequences, there is a lack of research considering multiple dimensions of health or providing a deeper contextual analysis. Drawing on the multi-dimensional health concept and the framework of mobilities and health, the present study further demonstrates the complexity and dynamic of this issue. Through in-depth interviews with frequent business travellers, it was found that frequent business trips as a part of work and life bring about a range of physical, psychological and social health impacts, which shows different characteristics and interact with each other. Perceptions of these health consequences vary among respondents with different travel patterns and personal situations. Moreover, the findings indicate that there may exist a paradoxical fact: as business travellers with longer experiences of traveling work tend to become more aware of the potential health cost of highly mobile lifestyles, however, the health impairment has generated and accumulated at the later life stages and can hardly be reversed even they stop traveling. Therefore, it is significant and meaningful to raise the public concern on this issue by stressing the dark side of business travel instead of only glamorizing it. This study contributes to previous literature on mobility and health by demonstrating the characteristics of business travel as a mobile working context and how it affects travellers’ health in multi-dimensions. It also provides managerial implications for individuals and organizations.
Understanding of how rural livelihood systems embedded in different social‐ecological contexts affect household energy consumption behaviour is critical for facilitating rural energy transition. This ...study assesses the energy consumption level and structure for three different livelihood systems, including mobile livelihood (ML), semi‐settled livelihood (SSL) and settled livelihood (SL), from the pastoral regions of the Tibetan Plateau. Results show that the average household energy consumption in ML, SSL and SL systems is 9250.1, 14 714.3 and 7004.5 kgce, respectively. Although yak dung is the dominant energy source in the ML and SSL systems, commercial energy sources are extensively used. When rural herders are resettled into peri‐urban areas, commercial energy sources become dominant though the percentage of yak dung consumption remains high. Mobile livestock production strategies and the associated rangeland tenure regimes and cultural practices are key determinant household energy choice factors of the ML and SSL systems. Comparatively, the role of income is more impactful on fuel consumption patterns in the SL system. Accordingly, this study argues that utilising a livelihood system approach in understanding household energy consumption behaviour allows us to design energy policies and innovative and customised clean energy sources that better fit rural livelihood systems.
This study sets out to provide an understanding of internationally mobile elites from a perspective that takes into account the social costs that come with being away from localized, everyday life. ...We show that mobile elites are often reluctant travellers and employ Bude and Dürrschmidt’s notion of ‘transclusion’ to understand the often-unrecognized ambivalence of mobile lifestyles. One way of coping with the existential dilemma of being away is to stay connected with family and friends through technologies of communication, which are deployed by the mobile elite under the regime of what Tomlinson calls ‘technologies of the hearth’. We arrive at the concept of ‘elastic mobility’, which highlights central push-and-pull processes in mobile lifestyles. The concept forwards a perspective on the social consequences of globalization that goes beyond contemporary ‘flow speak’.
The paper focuses on leisure oriented mobile lifestyle between urban home and rural second home in Finland which is one of the world's leading countries in terms of second home ownership and tourism. ...Spatial patterns and social practices of physical mobility related to second home use are revealed by using triangulation of research methods and data. Analysis is based on GIS data, questionnaire survey results and national statistics. A relational approach is applied to conceptualise and contextualise second home mobility which is influenced by many bio-physical and socio-cultural processes and changes. Relational elements and processes interlinked to past, present and future of second home related physical mobility are identified. Natural amenities form the physical geographical basis for rural second home distribution which correlates with length of shoreline, distance to urban areas and local land use in second home environments. Second home related spatial mobility patterns differ and depend on size of the urban region of origin. Helsinki metropolitan dwellers have the longest trips to second homes which is explained not merely by environmental but by historical, societal and social reasons as well. Second home related social mobility practices are dependent on cottage owners' and users' life phase and standard of second homes. Retiring baby boom generation is the largest and most active cottager group and after retirement the use of second homes increases remarkably. The vast majority of second home owners and users travel the cottage trips by private cars and wish to spend at least as much time at rural second home as present. However, they do not intend to give up the urban home which leads to the conclusion that leisure related lifestyle mobility in between urban and rural living environments will continue to characterise second home owners' and users' way of life. Keywords: rural second homes, mobile lifestyle, physical mobility, tourism geography, relational approach, Finland
The paper focuses on leisure oriented mobile lifestyle between urban home and rural second home in Finland which is one of the world’s leading countries in terms of second home ownership and tourism. ...Spatial patterns and social practices of physical mobility related to second home use are revealed by using triangulation of research methods and data. Analysis is based on GIS data, questionnaire survey results and national statistics. A relational approach is applied to conceptualise and contextualise second home mobility which is influenced by many bio-physical and socio-cultural processes and changes. Relational elements and processes interlinked to past, present and future of second home related physical mobility are identified. Natural amenities form the physical geographical basis for rural second home distribution which correlates with length of shoreline, distance to urban areas and local land use in second home environments. Second home related spatial mobility patterns differ and depend on size of the urban region of origin. Helsinki metropolitan dwellers have the longest trips to second homes which is explained not merely by environmental but by historical, societal and social reasons as well. Second home related social mobility practices are dependent on cottage owners’ and users’ life phase and standard of second homes. Retiring baby boom generation is the largest and most active cottager group and after retirement the use of second homes increases remarkably. The vast majority of second home owners and users travel the cottage trips by private cars and wish to spend at least as much time at rural second home as present. However, they do not intend to give up the urban home which leads to the conclusion that leisure related lifestyle mobility in between urban and rural living environments will continue to characterise second home owners’ and users’ way of life.
For the majority of action sport travellers and migrants, the transnational lifestyle is short-lived, a working holiday after university or between ‘real’ jobs. But for some, it becomes a career they ...pursue for many years. In so doing, committed action sport migrants develop meaningful connections within multiple contexts and networks across countries that contribute to their transnational sense of identity and belonging. Sustained mobilities in the action sport industry are often the result of many years of hard work, compromises, creativity and negotiations. This chapter consists of two parts, both of which draw upon interviews with long-time action sport migrants conducted either during their travels or upon adopting a less mobile lifestyle. To make meaning of their reflections, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach that engages selectively with literature and key concepts from the fields of sociology, cultural geography, and transnational and migration studies. In the first part I examine the opportunities, constraints and negotiations of career action sport migrants, focusing particularly on the experiences of those working in the ski industry. Here I also draw upon Foucault’s notion of circulation to examine the role of governments and the nation-state in enabling and constraining action sport mobilities via visa regulations. In the second part of this chapter I draw upon Conradson & McKay’s (2007) notion of ‘translocal subjectivities’ to examine the ‘dynamics of mobile subjectivities’ and describe the ‘multiply-located senses of self’ amongst action sport migrants who inhabit transnational social fields (p. 168).
REFLECTIONS ON MARGINAL MOBILE LIFESTYLES Juntunen, Marko; Kalčić, Špela; Rogelja, Nataša
Nordic Journal of Migration Research,
03/2014, Letnik:
4, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article focuses on mobile people who are largely overlooked in the contemporary studies of migration and mobility. Today, a rather limited but constantly growing number of people from Global ...North and Global South are wandering along transnational trajectories, without extended settlement anywhere in particular. They remain mobile because of inability to make the living they hoped for in the place of their origin, or because of being dissatisfied with the values or way of living in home society. Based on our fieldworks among Western liveaboards in the Mediterranean, new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe and Africa, and popular class (sha’bi)1 Moroccan men in the transnational space between Morocco and Spain, we demonstrate the central characteristic of these lifestyles that we prefer to conceptualise as “marginal mobilities”: they are highly mobile, not entirely forced nor voluntary lifestyles, which occur along loosely defined travel trajectories; they generally lack politicised public spheres; and they are marked by the sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation with the sedentary norm of the nation state.
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