An Evaluation of Mobile Phone Usage Restriction in Selected Public Places in Akure, Nigeria

The use of mobile phone has become widespread among Nigerians; both old and young. Indiscriminate use of mobile phone has become popular in public and private places. In public places, it is becoming difficult to achieve total restriction in mobile phone usage because of varying attitudinal tendencies within the society. There is need to evaluate the compliance of the individual phone user to non-compliance with various phone usage restriction laws in public buildings so as to determine the proactive method that can be employed in forestalling future occurrences. In this paper, the degree of compliance of people to mobile phone usage restriction laws in public places is evaluated. Information was gathered through questionnaire administration and visitation to selected public places such as, examination halls, banking halls, and detention centers (police cells and prison halls) in Akure. The questionnaires were presented in such a way that it will provide response to the issue of the degree of phone usage restriction compliance, attitudinal responses of public places managers to violators, and the perception of unauthorized phone users to restriction regulation. The data obtained were analyzed statistically using descriptive statistics based on percentages. The validation of the results were carried out using paired- t test to determine whether there is a significant difference between the degrees of phone usage restriction in the specific public places used in this study.  The results of the analysis showed that the phone usage restrictions were violated in all the places investigated and the highest violation response was recorded within the examination halls. The analysis further showed that the attitudinal response of the public places managers were encouraging while those of the users were not in favour of curbing mobile phone usage restriction. This shows that a proactive method should be devised to curb the use of mobile phone in unauthorized areas. Keywords: Mobile phone, call restriction, public places, reactivity.