The technology acceptance puzzle. Results of a representative survey in Lower Saxony

It is widely taken for granted that the interest in technology decreases with increasing age. Many studies and especially large scale surveys seem to confirm declining technology acceptance; however, it is argued that composition effects (e.g. increasing proportions of women among the older age groups), cohort effects (e.g. experience with different technologies during the lifetime) and various living and health conditions (e.g. living alone, having children in the neighborhood and experience of falls) have to be taken into account and that these factors will have different impacts on the acceptance of different scenarios of assistive technologies. The analyses are based on data from a self-administered questionnaire (n = 2032, a representative random sample of individuals aged 50 years and above in Lower Saxony, Germany). The survey briefly introduced four scenarios of ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies. Multinominal logistic regression was used to explore the correlations of acceptance and the independent variables mentioned. The results show that the simple assumption of an age effect, i.e. technology acceptance generally declines with increasing age, is misleading. An answer to the question whether older people will make use of assistive technologies in the future should consider specific scenarios and also various socioeconomic variables.