The Attitude Construct in IT Adoption Research â•fi A Scientometric Analysis

Understanding user’s attitudes represents one of the major objectives in IS adoption research. However, in some IS adoption models, as the most famous representative the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the relationship between user’s attitude and behavioral intention was found to be insignificant and was therefore excluded from later modifications of the respective models (e.g. TAM II and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology). Some authors in IS adoption literature indicate that there are operational and conceptual misconceptions of the attitude construct in IS adoption literature. To provide more information for this discussion within this paper, the descriptive results of a scientometric survey of fourteen IS top journals spanning 20 years and 147 articles, are presented with regards to the socio psychological grounding of attitude research. Several situational factors of adoption situations in literature e.g. adoption context or voluntariness of usage were captured in the data in order to analyze the occurrence of each characteristic in IS adoption models with reference to their influence on the attitude construct.