Extracting Best Set of Factors that Affect Students Adoption of Smartphone for University Education: Empirical Evidence from UTAUT-2 Model

Abstract

Technology acceptance models are used in studies aimed at predicting and explaining the user’s behaviors towards the acceptance and usage of new technologies. This paper reports the findings from a doctoral research which focused on analyzing the acceptance of smartphones as learning tools between the two contexts of the study: the College of Engineering (CX1) and the College of Education (CX2) at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. This study was guided by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model. The survey questionnaire targeted 310 respondents selected through opportunity sampling after distributing 1170 survey questionnaires. This reseach attempts to validate eh survey instrument using data analysis using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). This technique can better articulate intercorrelated variables together with more accuracy and adopts stringent model fit assessment and validation. This study adopted a five step factor extraction method using EFA in finding the best set of variables that explain the adoption of the smartphone as a learning tool.