Differentiating the Impact of Social Influence - An Empirical Analysis of Household Adopters

Although widely accepted as critical determinant for an individual’s adoption decision in households social influence is rather be known as the unloved child of technology adoption research. As several IS researchers pointed out the need for more sophisticated methods to assess social influence and a clarification of its role we aim to contribute to existing household adoption research by providing an empirical analysis observing the social influence of different referent groups and secondary sources on the behavioral intention to participate in social networking portals by different adopter groups. Therefore we evaluated survey data of 422 young professionals, 771 professionals and 226 managers with the help of multiregression analysis. We come up with two interesting contributions to existing household adoption research. On the one hand social influence of different referent groups and secondary sources significantly affects the intention of adopter groups with different career status, age and prior experience and on the other hand social influence differs for both source (referent group or secondary source) and sink (adopter group) with varying adopter’s career status.