Title

Implications Of Researcher Assumptions About Perceived Relative Advantage And Compatibility

Keywords

Adoption; Compatibility; Innovation Diffusion Theory; Relative Advantage; Scale Reuse

Abstract

Although scale reuse is an important and efficient research practice, it may not always be the most appropriate practice. Mechanistically reusing scales developed for a particular context may lead to a variety of undesirable effects. One of the risks is that frequently reused scales can inadvertently begin to alter the definitions of related constructs. When this occurs, a full understanding of the constructs can be lost. Innovation diffusion is one area in which evidence suggests that this has occurred, specifically for relative advantage and compatibility. This article seeks to better understand the risks of mechanistic scale reuse within the information systems field, with a specific focus on the relative advantage and compatibility constructs. We review the information systems literature focusing on IT adoption and diffusion, examining the theoretical and empirical relationships between relative advantage and compatibility. Evidence from this review indicates that there may be both conceptual and empirical overlap between the two, which has led to inconsistent empirical and theoretical treatment of the constructs across studies. We also report an empirical examination of the domain coverage of the scales, which provides evidence that the scales a) exhibit a high degree of conceptual and empirical overlap and b) only represent a subset of their full conceptualization. We offer recommendations for researchers who wish to use these constructs in future work. © 2008, Authors. All rights reserved.

Publication Date

4-30-2008

Publication Title

Data Base for Advances in Information Systems

Volume

39

Issue

2

Number of Pages

50-65

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/1364636.1364642

Socpus ID

85016146904 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85016146904

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