HOW INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES INFLUENCE TECHNOLOGY USAGE BEHAVIOR? TOWARD AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK YUANDONG YI, ZHAN WU, and LAI LAI TUNG Nanyang Technological University Singapore 639798 ABSTRACT Previous studies suggest that individual differences have main effects on technology use and that they also interact with perceptions about technologies to influence technology use. However, few studies examine both effects simultaneously and thus prior research offers only a partial glimpse of the whole picture. The purpose of this study is to incorporate individual differences into TAM and examine the two effects simultaneously. Online survey method was used to collect data. Results from quantitative analyses indicate that individual differences may influence technology use directly or indirectly via perceptions and that they may also moderate the relationships between perceptions and technology use. Based on the fmdings, we proposed an integrated framework, which suggests that individual differences influence technology use in multiple ways. Such a framework offers a comprehensive understanding of how individual differences influence technology use and thus provides a foundation on which research models can be theorized and empirically validated. Keywords: individual differences, perceptions, technology use. integrated framework, INTRODUCTION As documented in literature (27). information technologies are often not fully utilized by mainstream customers as much as they should. Consequently, examining what factors influence an individual's use of information technologies and how these factors influence technology usage behavior remains critical. Lakhanpal (21) reviewed the literature on innovation in organizations and developed a framework which indicates that the use of IT is influenced by individual factors, organizational factors, characteristics of IT. and environment factors. In this study, we focus on the first category, i.e. individual factors, following the recent interest in the effect of individual differences on the diffusion of IT (4. 33). Actually, researchers have shown that individual differences are important to technology use. For example. Gefen and Straub found that males and females have different perceptions about ease of use and usellilness toward email systems and thus have different email system usage behavior (13). Dabholkar and Bagozzi found that personal traits such as inherent novelty seeking influence the salient of attitude toward using a technology in determining the intention to use that technology (10). Although individual differences are important to understand technology usage behavior, IT adoption models such as technology acceptance model (11) have not paid sufficient attention to individual difference variables (4). Since technology acceptance model (TAM) appears to be the most widely accepted models that explain the relationship between perceptions and technology use (4), in the study we try to incorporate individual differences into TAM and explore how individual differences in combination with perceptions about new technologies influence technology usage behavior. FIGURE I First Research Stream and Conceptual Model I Individual ci^'ereoces Tochrology FIGURE 2 Second Research Stream and Conceptual Model II Pt»rrftptiors ncivicual d fferences r Tcchr i^lopv Winter 2005-2006 Journal of Computer Information Systems 52