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The research question is as follows:
RQ: Which of the two, households or organizations, adopt new technology the fastest, based on the case of implementing digital television in Denmark?
The context of this study is technological innovation, specifically the diffusion of a digital innovation. The innovation is a new digital television service which is also the object of this study.
The research question involves two affective variables, households and organizations. The units of analysis are also the households and institutions, with the following specifications:
Households: Households with analogue terrestrial television; 601.000 households.
Institutions: Institutions with 24-hour living facilities with analogue terrestrial television; approx. 2,200 institutions.
Institutions with 24-hour living facilities were the following types of institutions: asylum seekers’ temporary housing facilities, boarding schools, college dormitories, halfway houses, hospitals, hospices, institutions for criminal youths, institutions for disadvantaged children and youths, institutions for drug addicts, institutions for the mentally handicapped, institutions for the physically handicapped, military barracks, nursing homes, and prisons. In this European context they are typically called ‘public institutions’, and in Denmark these are typically 100 percent government-funded institutions (the exceptions in this case are boarding schools, college dormitories, and halfway houses that may mainly have private funding). In this study all the aforementioned organizations will be referred to as ‘institutions’.
Both the entire organization and the entire household are treated as single units of analysis, that is, the study is not about the technology acceptance process inside organizations and households, only about the outcome of the technology acceptance process.
There are two separate (that is, unconnected) variables in this study: the rate of adoption of a new digital television service in households and the rate of adoption of a new digital television service in organizations. With data on these two variables, it will be possible to compare the two variables and establish whether households or organizations are the fastest in their acceptance of new digital technology.