Contribution to Quality of Life: Cross-National Validation of New Metrics for Mobile Data Service Technology in Korea and Japan

Abstract

Every technology should be geared to improve the quality of users' lives. The important pre-requisite is to measure the contribution of the technology to quality of life reliably and validly. This study provides a theoretical and empirical basis for the development of better measures for the contribution of a mobile data service technology to the quality of users' lives. The reliability and validity were verified through online surveys in Korea and Japan. The survey results indicated that critical mobile data services could be identified using the measures. Moreover, the critical services were found to be different between Korea and Japan.

How Do Mobile Information Services Improve Quality of Life? The Case of Japanese Students

“…They propose that people actually experience and store the various events of their life in distinct domains, including leisure life, family life, friend life, cultural life, work life, community life, consumer life, financial life, health life, safety life, and self-life. These eleven life domains have been examined for mobile data services by Choi et al (2007a) concerning Japan and Korea. Our newly added life domains are educational life (Andrews andWithey, 1976, Choi et al 2007b), homehealthcare life (Jing and Andy, 2010), trustworthy life (Jing and Andy, 2010) and informational life (Nguyen et al, 2010) which are discussed below:…”

“…Moreover, we did not know yet which domains were most relevant to MIS in different countries and different users. Therefore, our study has investigated the following life domains from Choi et al (2007a), which have shown in Table 1.…”

“…Like Individual Contribution, Overall Contribution is conceptualized as the perceived contribution of MIS services to overall QoL. Choi et al (2007a) Past studies suggest that IT does have an influence on users' QoL. For example, Heijden's (2004) study of adoption behavior for hedonic systems implies that IT may have effects on leisure or culture life.…”

“…Rahman et al (2005) presented a picture of conditions of the world with respect to such interrelated domains of QoL. Choi et al (2007a) proposed eleven relationships between Individual Contribution and Overall Contribution of QoLin Korea and Japan and found some of them had stronger influence on the Overall Contribution. There are also very few studies on how young people's QoL has been improved owing to the mobile technology.…”

“…We ground our research framework in the following two parts. First one is the bottom-up spillover theory (explained in section 3.3) by Choi et al (2007a) with their eleven individual life domains contribution of MIS to QoL. These life domains are: leisure life, family life, friend life, cultural life, work life, community life, consumer life, financial life, health life, safety life, and self-life.…”