Variables Contributing To Older Adults' Acceptance Of Information Technology In China, Korea, And USA

More and more countries in the world including China are about to or already face a serious problem of nationwide population aging. Along with the changing of population structure, older adults will inevitably be one of the major user groups of information technology in the near future. In this background, the objectives of this research are: 1) to investigate variables contributing to older adults'technology acceptance; 2) to compare the importance of these factors; 3) to find out which factors significantly influencing use intention; 4) to compare cultural differencs; 5) to further investigate important factors by case study.First, this study used survey method. There were totally 233 subjects between 60 to 75 years old participated the survey. Four factors were found by factor analysis. They were named as Needs Satisfaction, Perceived Usability, Support Availability, and Public Acceptance. By comparing the scores of these four factors, the importance sequence is as Needs Satisfaction, Support Availability, Perceived Usability and Public Acceptance. Among these four factors, Needs Satisfaction and Perceived Usability significantly affecting the intention of older adults'use of information technology.Based on the survey results, two experiments were conducted to further investigate Needs Satisfaction and Perceived Usability which significantly affecting use intention. The first experiment was conducted in USA, Korea and China. There were totally 24 American, 23 Korean and 21 Chinese older adults participated the experiments. The main findings of the experiment were: 1) Chinese and Korean older adults' interest, intention and self-estimated frequency to use information technology to connect to others were higher that those of US older adults; 2) US participants were more interested and intent to use information technology to access information than to use information technology to connect to others; 3) US participants were more intend to use information technology with higher level of autonomy; 4) Chinese and Korean older adults were more interested in information technology with family help compared with US older adults; 5) US participants are more interested in information technology specially designed for older adults than information technology with accessible family help. The second experiment chose mobile phone as a representative of information technology which is widely used among older adults.The experiment investigated whether or not text margin on mobile phones could influence older adults'reading performance. There were totally 12 older adults participated the experiment. The experiment results showed that when the character size was 15pix*15pix (8 pt), text with inter-line spacing of 6-8pixels and inter-character spacing of 2-4pixels was appropriate for a higher readability for older adults. The survey and experiments'results can be used to interpret and predict technology acceptance behavior of older adults, which provide a solid theoretical basis and implementation methods for promotion of information technology in older adults.