Do (how) digital natives adopt a new technology differently than digital immigrants? A longitudinal study

Abstract

Although the information systems (IS) literature has revealed a variety of mechanisms involved in technology adoption and postadoption use, the literature lacks insights about how individuals with different usage characteristics process the information related to new IS and how their belief judgments and use behavior unfold over time. This study fills this void in the literature by conceptualizing and testing a comprehensive model to investigate the impact of user orientation toward technology use by digital natives (DNs) and digital immigrants (DIs) on technology continuous use behavior. The effect of DNs and DIs is currently gaining the attention of researchers. This study investigated the postadoption and use behavior of these groups using a three-wave panel model and with decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB) as the initial adoption model. The longitudinal model is a unified framework that sheds light on four different mechanisms underlying postadoption phenomena: (1) the belief judgment evaluation processes suggested by the DTPB model, (2) sequential updating mechanism, (3) feedback mechanism, and (4) habit mechanism. Based on multigroup analysis, we show that a clear pattern of differences in effect exists between DNs and DIs with respect to the sequential belief updating mechanism and that these results are relatively stable over time.