Non-adopters of social media : comparing their lifestyles, perceived innovation attributes, and sociodemographic attributes with all-adopters, partial-adopters, and minimum-adopters

This study adopted Rogers' diffusion of innovation model to investigate the adoption of three social media with high penetration in Taiwan-Facebook, Line, and email. Special attention was paid to identifying the factors that differentiated the non-adopters (who did not adopt any of the three social media) from the all-adopters (who adopted all three social media), the partial-adopters (who adopted two social media), and the minimum-adopters (who adopted only one social medium). Two methods were adopted; one was to conduct 20 intensive interviews and the other was to administer a nationwide telephone survey with 1042 valid questionnaires. Two conclusions were obtained: (1) The characteristics of the non-adopters were congruent with those of the laggards in Rogers' model, demonstrating that the non-adopters were less educated, less affluent, older, and used mass media less frequently than the other types of adopters; (2) the lifestyles of the non-adopters differed greatly from those of all-adopters, partial-adopters, and minimum-adopters.