Assessing the Factors That Affect Adoption of Social Research Network Site for Collaboration by Researchers Using Multi- Criteria Approach

Collaboration in research continuously gains importance. Recent developments in online collaboration technology, namely social research network sites (SRNS), specifically aim to support research collaboration. SRNS allow researchers to present themselves, to network, to communicate, and to collaborate. Acceptance of this technology by researchers has received little academic attention. Understanding the relationships between a user’s intention and the utilization of SRNS is an essential step in engaging the SRNS as an educational tool. Previous research focused on explaining user adoption from technology perceptions such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, interactivity, and relative advantage. However, current research models for technology acceptance can hardly explain the impact on the intention of using SRNS from the perspective of technology fit due to the lack of social constructs. However, users’ adoption is determined not only by their perception of the technology but also by the task technology fit. In other words, even though a technology may be perceived as being advanced, if it does not fit users’ task requirements, they may not adopt it. This study examines the impact of Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, social influence, facilitating condition, user resistance, individual, technology, task and social characteristics on users’ intentions in using SRNS by integrating the unified theory of acceptance and usage of technology (UTAUT), task-technology fit (TTF) model and social capital theory. In addition, we applied the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for ranking aforementioned factors. The TOPSIS, one of the multi-criteria decision making methods (MCDM), is developed to solve real-world decision problems that has continued to work satisfactorily across different application areas. Accordingly, we develop a new hierarchy model for TOPSIS using the aforementioned factors to assess their importance on adoption of social research network site for collaboration by researchers.