Making and Evaluating Participant Choice in Experimental Research on Information Technology: A Framework and Assessment

Evaluations of participant samples for experiments in information systems research often appear to be informal and intuitive. Appropriate participant choice becomes a more salient issue as the population of information technology professionals and users grows increasingly diverse, and the distribution of relevant characteristics in participant samples such as age, gender, nationality, and experience can often be unrepresentative of the characteristics’ distribution in target populations. In this paper, we present a framework based on widely accepted standards for evaluating participant choice and providing rationale that the choice is appropriate. Using a step-by-step approach, we compare current practice in experimental studies from top information systems journals to this framework. Based on this comparison, we recommend how to improve the treatment of participant choice when evaluating the validity of study inferences and how to discuss the tradeoffs involved in choosing participant samples

Effects of Prior Use, Intention, and Habit on IT Continuance Across Sporadic Use and Frequent Use Conditions

This article is motivated by the desire to integrate and expand two literature streams, one that models effects of prior information technology (IT) use and habit strength on continued IT use and another that studies how to apply such models to IT that are used in a characteristically sporadic manner. We find that joint predictions of continuance intention, prior IT use, and habit strength within our research model are superior to subsets of the model across the extended range of usage frequency we studied. However, subsets of the model can also provide reasonable predictions where all measures are not available

A Quantitative and Qualitative Study of Facebook Privacy using the Antecedent-Privacy Concern-Outcome Macro Model

Information privacy is a complex and important phenomenon to understand. Because of this, several recent review articles have integrated findings across various studies and contexts. In this study we investigate information privacy in the online social networking context using the Antecedent-Privacy Concern-Outcome (APCO) Macro Model as the theoretical lens. We use both quantitative and qualitative data collected in a survey of Facebook users. Online social networking provides a rich window into privacy concerns and the resulting behavioral reactions. By analyzing both types of data, we are able to show additional support and insights for our hypotheses tests. These results provide future research opportunities that include modifying the APCO model and refining its constructs to be more context and risk-specific

Do People Trust Facebook as a Technology or as a Person ? Distinguishing Technology Trust from Interpersonal Trust

Several researchers have studied technology trust in terms of the technological artifact of the technology. Two different types of trusting beliefs could apply to websites. First, the trusting beliefs may relate to interpersonal characteristics such as benevolence, competence, and integrity. Second, they may relate to technology characteristics such as helpfulness, functionality, and reliability. Since social networking websites like Facebook may demonstrate either interpersonal trust characteristics or technology trust characteristics, researchers may need to carefully choose the beliefs to model. Thus it is important to not only understand the conceptual meaning of these beliefs, but also whether human and technology trust beliefs of technology trust are distinct. Using data collected from Facebook users, we test alternate factor structures for a measurement model containing three interpersonal trust beliefs and three technology trust beliefs. We find the data fits a firstorder six-factor model the best. This suggests people can distinguish between trust in Facebook’s interpersonal and technology trust characteristics. it also shows they can distinguish between the individual components of these characteristics

Interdisciplinary Research and Publication Opportunites in Information Systems and Health Care

Healthcare is a large and growing industry that is experiencing major transformation in its information technology base. IS confronted similar transformations in other industries and developed theories and methods that should prove useful in healthcare applications. In turn, IS may benefit from incorporating knowledge from health informatics, a discipline that studies IT within medical and healthcare contexts. Despite the benefits, it is often a struggle for interdisciplinary researchers in IS and healthcare to publish their work, especially in journals directed toward IS audiences. In this paper, we outline strategies and resources to help ease this publication bottleneck. As a part of our discussion, we identify and categorize journal outlets for interdisciplinary research in IS and healthcare

An Integrative Model of IT Continuance: Applying Measures of Intention, Prior IT Use, and Habit Strength Across Conditions of Sporadic and Frequent IT Use

This paper is motivated by the desire to integrate and expand two recent literature streams, one that models effects of prior IT use and habit strength on continued IT use and another that studies how to apply such models to IT that are used in a characteristically sporadic manner. We find joint predictions of continuance intention, prior IT use, and habit strength within our research model are superior to subsets of the model across the range of frequency we studied. However, subsets of the model are able to provide reasonable predictions where all measures are not available

Predicting Patients’ Use of Provider-Delivered E-Health: The Role of Facilitating Conditions

This chapter presents a new rational-objective (R-O) model of e-health use that accounts for effects of facilitating conditions as well as patients’ behavioral intention. An online questionnaire measured patients’ behavioral intention to use a new e-health application as well as proxy measures of facilitating conditions that assess prior use of and structural need for health services. A second questionnaire administered three months later collected patients’ self-reported use of e-health during the intervening period. The new model increased predictions of patients’ e-health use (measured in R2) by more than 300% over predictions based upon behavioral intention alone, and all measured factors contributed significantly to prediction of use during the three-month assessment period

Information Systems and Health Care VIII-Using Paper-Based Scenarios to Examine Perceptions of Interactive Health Communication Systems

While information and communication technologies can increase the health care provided to underserved populations, research concerning these technologies often involves only those patients who possess access to technology or who are otherwise willing and able to use it. This issue is important for both researchers and practitioners because non-users\u27 beliefs may not only be different from users\u27 beliefs, they may become more important to understand as access to technology increases. To address this problem: 1. We develop a model of the antecedents to perceived usefulness of an interactive health communication (IHC) system. While our research model combines health-related beliefs with technology perceptions, the antecedents can all be measured before an individual has contact with a particular IHC system. Thus, in the current (and in future) work, they can be used to assess the beliefs of individuals who may not currently be willing or able to use technology. 2. We test this model using paper-based scenarios that depict hypothetical interactions with an IHC system. These paper-based scenarios are more flexible and easier to use than a working system, thus we are able to obtain data from many sources, resulting in a perceptually diverse sample. Results of our hypothesis testing show that patients with higher knowledge and discipline are less likely than those with less knowledge and/or discipline to find an IHC system useful. In addition we learned several lessons from our research process including how to increase participation rates and what reactions to expect from participants

Trends in U.S. Consumers’ Use of E-Health Services: Fine-Grained Results from a Longitudinal, Demographic Survey

Although growth in U.S. consumers’ overall use of e-health is strong, it is being driven by only a portion of the e-health services that are offered through online health portals. Fine-grained, longitudinal analysis of three representative e-health services shows that, while online communication with medical personnel has grown consistently between 2003 and 2012, the purchase of health supplies online plateaued by 2007, and participation in online support groups has been flat since 2003. Socio-economic factors of income and education level continue to have an impact on consumers’ use of e-health; however, differences based on age, sex, and race/ethnicity are trending lower during this period. The findings caution against the common practice of studying e-health adoption principally at the level of online health portals, which can mask substantial variation in adoption trends among the underlying e-health services, and suggest that it is important to update trend studies on a regular basis to maintain currency

The Distinct Roles of Prior IT Use and Habit Strength in Predicting Continued Sporadic Use of IT

This article studies prediction of continued IT use in conditions where individuals use the technology sporadically. Our study augments the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model [Venkatesh et al., 2003] with measures of prior IT use frequency and habit strength. We find these two factors provide distinct predictions which explain most of the effects that occur within the model under sporadic use conditions