Mediating Effects of Mobile Phone Use on the Relationship between Mobile Addiction and Academic Behavior

Since there is little research on the mediative effect of excessive mobile phone use on mobile addiction and academic behavior among university students, hence, the current study sought to study the relationship between these three variables. Data was collected from 435 university students through an online Google form survey sent through a WhatsApp link. Overall, the result shows that that level of mobile addiction was moderate. More than 40% of the respondents had experienced the impact of excessive use of mobile phone while more than 16% experienced negative academic behaviour. Besides, structural equation model fit and measurement models were used to analyze the data with a two-stage structural equation modelling. The first stage involved the assessment of measurement model or also known as Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) for negative academic behavior, excessive mobile phone use and mobile addiction. The measurement model achieved a good fitness index where, RMSEA = 0.064, NFI = 0.9, CFI = 0.932, TLI = 0.921, and Relative Chi-square (Chisq/df) = 2.855. In the second stage of assessment of the structural equation model, the study confirmed that excessive mobile phone use mediates the relationship between mobile addiction and negative academic behavior among students in higher education in Malaysia. The novelty of this study lies in the exploratory analysis of these three variables with a systematic method to find a conclusive result. In summary the findings imply that higher education institutions need to have better guidelines to regulate mobile phone use among students in higher learning institutes.