A phenomenological investigation of Internet usage among older individuals

By Philip J. Trocchia, Swinder Janda. 2000

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Older consumers comprise a growing but under‐represented segment of Internet users. However, compared to many younger groups, members of this segment often possess more discretionary time and income. This presents a significant opportunity for marketers of Internet related products and services. In order to better understand older individuals’ attitudes and motivations concerning Internet usage, phenomenological interviews were conducted among six Internet users and six non‐users. From the emic perspective of the informants, and the etic interpretation of the transcripts, the following six themes characterizing differences between Internet using and Internet non‐using older individuals emerged: Reference group affiliation, Technology schema, Resistance to change, Nature of social relations, Perception of reality, and Physical dexterity. The marketing implications of these findings are identified and discussed.

Subfields: Demography, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/574a3a0bd041b9dd2cba0f3ecec367dfc8cf8a5d

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Citations in the corpus

The adoption of electronic banking technologies by US consumers (2004, background): “Research has also linked age and adoption of technologies, with younger persons being more likely to adopt (Zeithaml and Gilly, 1987; Trocchia and Janda, 2000; Karjaluoto et al., 2002; Lee et al., 2002).”
Age, gender and income: do they really moderate online shopping behaviour? (2011, background): “Furthermore, younger individuals usually possess greater experience with the internet, and aspects such as usefulness and attitude acquire greater importance for them, whilst older people perceive greater risks, have more difficulty in creating syntactically complex commands and place more importanc”
Is a picture really worth a thousand words?: - on the role of images in e-commerce (2014, methodology): “On the other hand, product images are used to provide a clear and attractive picture in a trust-worthy way in order to convey information to consumers about the product and its quality.”