The MATH of Internet Adoption: Comparing Different Age-Groups

Abstract

Modern societies share two common trends: First, elderly peopleform a strongly growing group in the population (societal aging)and, second, the importance of information and communicationtechnology is growing rapidly. However, the elderly are oftenexcluded from benefiting from IT-enabled service delivery: Anage-related digital divide exists. Current research lacksunderstanding what reasons prevent elderly to use the internet.Therefore, this paper examines the intention to use the internet ina private manner among the elderly. For higher explanatory powerwe also included two other age-groups (G1: <40; G2: 40-59;G3: >59). Here, we build a survey instrument based on the Modelof Acceptance of Technology in Households (MATH) and test themodel against comprehensive survey data (n=501). We find outthat MATH is able to explain between 42% and 81% of thevariance in private internet usage intention. Moreover, severaldifferences in driver for usage intention exist, e.g. was theimportance of applications for fun much higher in the first agegroup than among the other. Potentially fruitful avenues for futureresearch are discussed.

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