Internet adoption by the elderly: employing IS technology acceptance theories for understanding the age-related digital divide
By Björn Niehaves, Ralf Plattfaut. European Journal of Information Systems, 2014
450 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Information technology (IT) allows members of the growing elderly population to remain independent longer. However, while technology becomes more and more pervasive, an age-related underutilisation of IT remains observable. For instance, elderly people (65 years of age and older) are significantly less likely to use the Internet than the average population (see, for instance, European Commission, 2011). This age-related digital divide prevents many elderly people from using IT to enhance their quality of life through tools, such as Internet-based service delivery. Despite the significance of this phenomenon, the information systems (IS) literature lacks a comprehensive consideration and explanation of technology acceptance in general and more specifically, Internet adoption by the elderly. This paper thus studies the intentions of the elderly with regard to Internet use and identifies important influencing factors. Four alternative models based on technology acceptance theory are tested in the context of comprehensive survey data. As a result, a model that explains as much as 84% of the variance in technology adoption among the elderly is developed. We discuss the contribution of our analyses to the research on Internet adoption (and IT adoption in general) by the elderly, on the digital divide, and on technology acceptance and identify potentially effective paths for future research and theoretical development.
Subfields: Demography, Information Systems and Management, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d5229c728cbfcc211f84ce5a230ba908543f681
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Citations in the corpus
- Mobile health technology adoption across generations: Narrowing the digital divide (2018, background): “, 2010), exhibit an unwillingness to disclose personal information online (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2012), and resist adopting new technologies (Niehaves and Plattfaut, 2013).”
- Predicting the acceptance and use of information and communication technology by older adults: An empirical examination of the revised UTAUT2 (2017, background): “Reflecting these trends, current research points to a digital divide between people who have regular access to technologies and those who do not (Niehaves & Plattfaut, 2014).”
- Measurement of Digital Literacy Among Older Adults: Systematic Review (2020, methodology): “The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology (UTAUT) was also used by 2 studies from Germany [9,30] and 1 study from Bangladesh [31].”
- Smart Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Algorithms (STARA): Employees’ perceptions of our future workplace (2017, background): “Chan-Olmsted, Rim, and Zerba (2013) report that young people are more accepting of mobile technology, while Niehaves and Plattfaut (2014) con fi rm that technology use is higher amongst younger people.”