Attitude and Usage of Mobile Phone among Students in Yazd University of Medical Science

Implication for health policy/practice/research/medical education: This article will help policy makers to plan programs to effect on unhealthy behaviors of people. article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Dear Editor Mobile phones as a symbol of electronic century and digital world has spared worldwide especially in youth (1, 2). Subscribers of mobile phones were increased from 12. show that the prevalence of mobile use will be increased to 95% till 2013 (2). In Iran Subscribers were increased from 4.3 million in 2004 to 41 million in 2008; it is estimated that about 53 – 55 million are subscribers of mobile phone in Iran now (2). Communication technologies (that causes to higher level in quality of life) have several benefits in our modern life; but we can't disregard some negative effects of mobile phones that caused serious social and cultural problems in communities (2). This study tries to detect the attitude and practices among students of Yazd University of medical sciences were living in dormitories about using mobile phones. This cross sectional study was done on 245 students, were living in university dormitories of Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences. A researcher designed a questionnaire to collect data. Internal validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a team of experts in communication science and health education. Its external validity also confirmed by a pilot study, using a group of students whom were not participating in the main study (Alpha chornbach = 0.72). The questionnaire was consisted in three parts: demographic data, 11 questions on attitude and 10 questions about practice. All registered data were analyzed by ANOVA (for analysis of replies to attitude questions according to sex) and Chi-square (analysis of GPA difference) tests under SPSS software. Significant level was considered as P < 0.05. had not mentioned their GPA in questionnaire. Mean GPA in women was higher than men (P = 0.005). 195 participants' families (79.6%) were living in cities and 46 (18.8%) in villages. 18 (7.3%) assessed their family economic status as affluent, 58 (23.7%) as relatively affluent , 149 (60.8%) as average income and 16 (6.5%) as low income. 240 (98%) of all participants had mobile phones and only 5 (2%) were not mobile subscribers. Mean scores of attitude in men and women were 41.82 ± …