| For decades, scholars and practitioners have tried to understand the factors that influence technology acceptance. Although diffusion and adoption of innovations have long been studied (Bass 1969; Rogers and Shoemaker 1971; Rogers 1983; Davis et al. 1989), there have been no known studies to comprehensively examine the role of affect in consumer adoption of high technology innovations. The main objective of this dissertation was to examine the factors contributing to consumer adoption of high technology innovations using a modified version of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). To accomplish this, the dissertation used an integrated theoretical framework that built on c-TAM (Bruner and Kumar forthcoming), a version of TAM tailored for the consumer setting.; In general, the results provided empirical support for the proposed model using structural equation modeling. The findings generally confirm earlier research on TAM and the proposed extensions. Most notably, the findings suggest that both cognition (perceived usefulness) and affect (pleasure and arousal) have significant, direct, and positive effects on attitude toward adopting the innovation. Furthermore, perceived ease of use only has an indirect effect on attitude via perceived usefulness. Judged by its indirect (through attitude) effect on behavioral intention, perceived usefulness was found to be the most significant factor followed by pleasure, and arousal. However, neither relative advantage (a cognitive factor) nor dominance (an affective factor) showed significant effects on attitude. Also, while the main effects of pleasure and arousal were significant, their interaction was not. Self-efficacy was found to influence cognition perceptions and emotional reactions. Results also indicated that engagement in different types of tasks (utilitarian vs. hedonic) can induce a variation in path strengths on both cognitive and affective responses. Finally, attitude exhibited a strong positive effect on behavioral intention in the consumer context even though it has not always been an important determinant of intention in workplace applications of TAM.; Overall, c-TAM explained 62% of the variance in attitude toward technology adoption, a substantive increase compared to previous research. These findings make a contribution to scholarly research and have implications for practitioners. Limitations of the study and directions for future research were also discussed. |
