An adoption model to assess e-service technology acceptance

Abstract

As the world today is witnessing the remarkable growth of information and communication technology development and the Internet popularity, the widespread use of the electronic service (e-service) is becoming inevitable. Many e-service projects have been developed but since they are not used by users, they cannot help to improve organizational performance. As the user adoption of an e-service is an essential key for a successful and an effective implementation of any e-service project, there is a need to access the user acceptance of the system. This research developed the E-Service Technology Acceptance Model (ETAM) to assess the user acceptance of an e-service technology. According to the literature review in the field of e-service technology and the acceptance theories, this research identified the main factors influencing the acceptance of e-services, namely; satisfaction and quality where the dimensions of these factors were extracted from the previous studies. In order to categorise the dimensions, an exploratory survey was developed and conducted among the university students and then, the Exploratory Factor Analysis was applied using the SPSS Software. Then, a confirmatory survey was designed and tested to test the validity (content and construct) and the reliability of the instrument, before it was used to evaluate the ETAM. The survey was conducted among the e-service users in Malaysia and 426 questionnaires were collected. Finally, the Structural Equation Modelling using Lisrel was applied to validate the casual relations between the constructs and to assess the goodness-of-fit for the ETAM. The result of this study revealed that quality, security and satisfaction significantly influenced the intention to use an e-service and consequently the acceptance of the e-service technology. The ETAM model developed in this study can be used as a foundation for e-service providers to develop strategies to encourage people to use e-service and to increase the usage and the acceptance of e-services in Malaysia. Moreover, the ETAM which explains 71.8% of variance can help to evaluate and predict how users will respond to an e-service before starting to develop an e-service project. This model can also be applied it to improve the provided e-service to increase the usage rate.