How to Measure Sessions of Mobile Device Use? Quantification, Evaluation, and Applications

Abstract: Research on mobile phone use often starts with a question of "How much time users spend on using their phones?". The question involves an equal-length measure that captures the duration of mobile phone use but does not tackle the other temporal characteristics of user behavior, such as frequency, timing, and sequence. In the study, we proposed a variable-length measure called "session" to uncover the unmeasured temporal characteristics. We use an open source data to demonstrate how to quantify sessions, aggregate the sessions to higher units of analysis within and across users, evaluate the results, and apply the measure for theoretical or practical purposes.