Impact of Usefulness, Ease of Use, Enjoyment, Attitude and Subjective Norms on Behavioural Intentions and Adoption of Virtual Communities: An Empirical Study

Abstract

The advent and proliferation of free-of-charge, democratic, interactive and innovative Web 2.0 technologies have provided more and better internet platforms in the form of Virtual communities, that allow users to build personalized content through participation and sharing, and thereby have impacted individuals and has opened new vistas for business organisations in an unprecedented way. But this has also necessitated the need to understand the factors affecting users acceptance and need of these platforms in order to make these platforms more marketing friendly and popular. This paper attempts to explore the general users acceptance of virtual communities using integrated TAM and TRA models. The proposed hypotheses are further tested using Regression Analysis. The obtained results indicate that Attitude of an individual towards virtual communities, Subjective Norms and Perceived Ease of Use have positive influence on his/her Behavioral Intention whereas Perceived usefulness and Perceived Enjoyment did not support the hypotheses. Also, Behavioral Intentions of the individuals were not at all found to be correlated with Adoption of virtual communities. The findings provide substantial insights for marketers and developers of these communities.

Keywords: TAM, TRA, Virtual Communities, Behavioural intention Models

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