Consumer Innovativeness in Purchase of Hi-Tech Home Appliances and the Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior in Electronics Market - A Field Study from Eskisehir , Turkey

This study intends to find out the consumer innovativeness and perceived risk in high technology product adoption. A survey on 460 respondents who are selected via stratified sampling of whom 452 are found eligible to be analyzed. The respondents are required to answer 50 questions of which three on ordinal scale and the five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 42 are statements which are designed to reflect the purchase and usage behavior of high-tech products of these people. The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 42 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale. Three statements are placed on ordinal scale and reflect the traits attached on hi-tech products ranking in terms of importance. The remaining five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Ten research hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 42 variables to seven basic components as "Technological innovativeness, perceived risks, creative reuse, consumer innovativeness, cognitive innovativeness, technology readiness and technological sophistication. Cronbach's Alpha for scale reliability is (? = 0.747) and the sample adequacy ratio (KMO ) is 0.938. In addition non-parametric bivariate analysis in terms of Chi-Square is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey is listed.