Exploring the Roles of User Resistance and Social Influences on Smartphone Acceptance and Continuous Usage

스마트폰 채택 및 지속사용에 있어 사용자 저항과 사회적 영향력의 역할에 대한 탐색연구

This study examines the roles of user resistance and social influences on the acceptance and continuous usage of smartphones at different stages of adoption. The respondents were classified into three groups according to their innovation adoption stage : non-user group, the potential user group and the trial user group. Theories relevant to user resistance, social influences including normative social influences and informational social influences, as well as user adoption and continuance behavior were reviewed and integrated into our research model. In order to verify the proposed structured equation model, we conducted an online survey by targeting mobile phone users and collected data to be analyzed through a partial least squares (PLS) test. This study tested whether there exists differences in the effects of user resistance and different types of social influence on user's adoption or continuance intetion among these three groups. The results showed that user resistance exists in all adopter groups and that it has significant negative influences on intention to use a smartphone. The findings also revealed that user resistance can be enhanced or resolved by two types of social influence; informational social influence resolves user resistance regardless of the adopter category, while normative social influence enhances the user resistance of potential users. Furthermore, the findings show that social influence regardless of the type positively affects user intention. Several theoretic and practical implications pertaining to the results are discussed.