Four Types of Attitudes in ICT Acceptance and Use? A Critical Assessment on the Basis of Empirical and Scientometric Data

Abstract

User attitudes are a major predictor of the endogenous variables in ICT adoption models. However it is known in the community that the predictive validity of user attitudes on behavioral intention to adopt ICT suffers from inconsistencies. Being a basic predictor of behavioral intention in models like TRA or TPB, user attitudes turned out not to be predictive of behavior in other studies [1]. Some authors have addressed this problem and introduced solution approaches based on splitting the construct into four different sub constructs. This paper evaluates these approaches on the basis of social psychological literature, PLS results of a survey, and scientometric data of fourteen IS top journals. The findings indicate that the problem of insignificance is not caused by a conceptual misspecification, but rather by a combination of conceptual and situational factors affecting the relationship between attitude and behavioral intention.