Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design, Department of

 

First Advisor

Jennifer Johnson Jorgensen

Document Type

Thesis

Date of this Version

5-2019

Third Advisor

Andrew Zimbroff

Citation

Sorensen, K., "Millennials' Acceptance of Voice Activated Shopping" (2019). Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research.

Comments

A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Science, Major: Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design, Under the Supervision of Professor Jennifer Johnson Jorgensen. Lincoln, Nebraska: May 2019

Copyright (c) 2019 Katelyn Nicole Sorensen

Abstract

The rise of voice technologies has changed the way individuals complete tasks and interact with their devices. Retail companies are now offering voice features to shop for products, but there is a gap in literature about consumers’ acceptance of using voice technology to make purchases. Previous studies have compared the different brands of voice technologies, investigated privacy issues, or explained the acceptance of voice technology. Millennials’ acceptance and shopping through voice technologies have not been researched before. Kääriä (2017) calls for future studies to focus on voice technologies, since the technology is constantly improving, and new forms are entering the market.

Millennials are known to adapt to new technologies quicker and make up a fourth of the spending power (Cutler, 2015; Lissitsa & Kol, 2016). A majority of the cohort has been found to use voice technology daily, but the use of the technology has yet to be studied (Moore, 2018). Thus, this study explains millennials’ acceptance of shopping through voice technologies by testing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

The TAM was the theoretical framework for this study (Davis, 1985). The TAM is found to be more accurate than other models in measuring the acceptance of technology and is widely used by researchers (Shamy & Hassanein, 2017). The TAM model includes two main variables, which are perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) (Davis, 1989). In addition, perceived enjoyment (PE) and perceived innovativeness (PI) were added by subsequent research (Davis, Bagozzi, & Warshaw, 1992). The relationship of gender, age, and experience to behavior intention (BI) were also added to the model (Venkatesh, Thong, & Xu, 2012), and were incorporated into the current study. The purpose of this thesis was to explain the relationships between PU, PEOU, PE, and PI to BI for millennials.

Data was collected through an online survey created on Qualtrics and disseminated via Amazon Mechanical Turk. A total of 204 surveys were collected and coded for analysis through SPSS. A regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationships between the TAM variables. Surprisingly, gender was found to influence BI, thus women were more likely to use the technology in the future. Age and level of experience did not influence BI. When testing age, gender, and level of experience against PU, PEOU, PE, and PI no significant relations were found, except for gender on PI. Women thought voice technology was more innovative than men, therefore, gender influenced PI. Respondents found shopping through voice to be useful, enjoyable, and innovative. However, millennials believed it was difficult to use, thus retailers should investigate how to make the technology more intuitive. The results of this study indicate that millennials are accepting of using voice technology to shop and retailers should consider offering the skills to do so.

Advisor: Jennifer Johnson Jorgensen

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