Antecedents of Innovation Resistance of Senior Drivers’ Using Telematics

Abstract

Owing to inevitable aging trend worldwide the traffic safety issues among seniors especially raising traffic fatalities have drawn a great emphasis in countries The adoption of telematics with its multiple functionalities could substantially have positive effects on seniors’ driving performance and lower road traffic fatalities by compensating their physical restrictions and mental obstacles while driving The aim of this focus group study is to understand senior drivers’ innovation resistance and its influential factors in adopting telematics devices and services Innovation resistance theory is applied as the theoretical framework Functional barriers of usage value and risk and psychological barriers of tradition and image are incorporated in the research model together with the constructs of information overload self-efficacy and technology anxiety Empirical data are collected from 360 senior drivers who age 55 years old and over and own an effective driver license in Taiwan via in-depth questionnaire survey Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are conducted to examine the discrepancy between the hypotheses and empirical data and test whether the proposed theoretical model fits the empirical data Subsequently structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to test the causal model and understand the relationships among constructs The results of SEM indicate that information overload has the strongest impact on innovation resistance followed by value barrier image barrier and tradition barrier Overall psychological dimensions of tradition barrier and image barrier are even greater sources of senior drivers’ resistance to telematics than function barriers of value barrier and external variables of information overload for significantly showing more influential factors In addition three causal relationships (i e self-efficacy to technology anxiety information overload to self-efficacy and information overload to technology anxiety) are verified to be statistically significant in the predicted direction showing the strong linkages among three external variables In the end this study provides some managerial implications from the perspectives of the design and campaign of the telematics for government manufactures and retailers to possibly encourage senior drivers in adopting vehicular telematics

Date of Award	2014 Aug 5
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chun-Hsiung Liao (Supervisor)