Understanding Diffusion Theory & Everett Rogers: Reflections on Process & Influences, Lecture notes of Voice

Download Understanding Diffusion Theory & Everett Rogers: Reflections on Process & Influences and more Lecture notes Voice in PDF only on Docsity! University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (ASC) Annenberg School for Communication 2004 Some Reflections on Diffusion Theory and the Role of Everett Rogers Robert Hornik robert.hornik@asc.upenn.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Hornik, R. (2004). Some Reflections on Diffusion Theory and the Role of Everett Rogers. Journal of Health Communication, 9 (suppl 1), 143-148. https://doi.org/10.1080/1081070490271610 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/783 For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu. Some Reflections on Diffusion Theory and the Role of Everett Rogers Disciplines Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/783 3 Classes of Explanation for Adoption Speed 1. Relatively fixed characteristics of individuals. These include variables like personality, drives, intelligence, openness to change, fatalism, empathy, need for achievement, persuasibility, or sensation-seeking. In each case, an argument is made that people who have more or less of the characteristic are more likely to adopt a new behavior, whether that be the case of an agricultural innovation more likely to be ignored by a farmer described as fatalistic, or a willingness to try marijuana among youth described as high sensation-seeking. 2. Moderately fixed characteristics of individuals. Innovation is often quicker among those with more education, among those with a greater store of relevant information, or among those with sophisticated communication skills. This education or stored information may permit them to process information about a new innovation more quickly and sort out its relevance to their lives or livelihood. For example, a Guatemalan woman who understands the language of the national radio broadcasts as well as her local language, may be more likely to hear about, and understand, the value of a newly available form of contraception. These moderately fixed characteristics of individuals contrast with the previous category, because there is an assumption that these skills can be readily learned over the life course, while the others are seen as the product of genetic endowment or early upbringing. 3. Learned beliefs/skills of individuals. Much of behavioral theory focuses on the role of what benefits or costs people think will result if they engage in particular behavior (adopt an innovation.) The balance of such beliefs, often called outcome expectancies, are seen as likely determinants of whether or not someone will engage in a behavior(cf. Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). Those who believe that immunizing their child for measles will produce more benefit than cost are expected to be readier to bring their child for a measles vaccine. A second type of explanation that falls in this category is what Bandura (1986) called self-efficacy, the belief that one has the specific skills to engage in a recommended behavior. The person who has confidence that he or she knows the skills needed to stop smoking is more likely to adopt that innovation. 4. Structural characteristics of individuals. Personality and skills and beliefs are not the only characteristics of individuals that may matter in their speed of adoption. Often income or wealth may constrain adoption—for example, high costs of drugs may force some people to fail to adopt recommended regimens. However, income may not be the 4 only individual structural characteristic that matters: for example people working full-time with families to take care of may have income but given their free time may be less likely to engage in recommended daily physical exercise than their non-working peers. 5. Social context. There are also characteristics which are not defined by individuals which may affect speed of adoption. Individuals who are embedded in particular social networks may have better access to information about an innovation, or they may feel more normative pressure to act according to the social networks’ preference. These social influences may lead them toward or away from a recommended innovation adoption; a youth social network may create pressure to initiate smoking; a person considering taking up running as exercise may find that easier because of a close friend who lets her know about all the means for getting past the inevitable hurdles. 6. Structural characteristics of communities. Previously structural characteristics of individuals were cited as potential explanations for innovation speed. However, the location of the ‘‘blame’’ for these is a slippery matter. Equally well these can be recharacterized as structural characteristics of communities. Individual income constrains individual adoption of a recommended drug regimen; from another perspective, the failure of a nation to subsidize drugs to make them affordable constrains individuals’ abilities to follow recommended drug regimens. Similarly, low immunization rates in a developing country can be explained because of individual failures to make the trip to a health facility or by health system failures to reach out to their target audience. Obesity can be blamed on the failure of individuals to add 30 minutes a day of exercise, or by the failure of city designers to assure that the locations of residential areas, schools, shopping areas and working sites encourage walking rather than car riding. 7. Characteristics of the innovation. Some innovations are more difficult to adopt than are others (it is harder to start rock climbing than to begin walking as an exercise strategy.) Thus one would expect quicker times of adoption for some innovations than for others. Rogers (1995) described characteristics which he expects will predict the ease (and thus the speed) of adoption, including relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. However, it might also be said that various versions of one innovation will vary in their ease of adoption for the same reasons. Thus, a slow-release medication which need be taken once in 24 hours may be more readily accepted than a medically identical one drug that requires administration every four hours. 5 8. Characteristics of the diffusion system. Finally, the speed of adoption may be explained by characteristics of the diffusion system itself. If the innovation involves the actual distribution of a physical commodity (a vaccination, a new seed variety, a condom) people are likely to vary in their ease of access to the distribution system: some people live next door to the vaccination clinic and some live a half day’s walk away. (These characteristics of the diffusion system are differentiated from the broader set of community characteristics only in that they are specific to the diffusion system for the particular innovation, rather than more general structural characteristics). And whether or not a physical commodity is involved, the communication system used to diffuse the idea may also affect the speed of adoption. Thus, a diffusion campaign which purchases heavy advertising across media which reach a range of target segments to market its idea (e.g., smoking cessation, initiation of exercise) may show a sharply different pattern of diffusion than a campaign which depends on personal diffusion and begins with an elite population and hopes for trickle down. This particular organization of the classes of explanations may or may not work well for all applications. However the deeper arguments embedded in this or any parallel typology are these: 1. There are many legitimate explanations for adoption speed worth attention, not just the individual or collective psychology of adopters or adopting institutions, which may dominate some areas of applied adoption work. Depending on which explanations are considered and which are found to be consistent with the evidence, the path for the most promising intervention will vary sharply. 2. The same facts can often be characterized from different perspectives. As an example, differences in speed of adoption of fertilizer can all involve the same story but each fall into a different class of explanations: One explanation points to individual structural characteristics—lack of cash—as an explanation for the failure to adopt a new behavior—the use of fertilizer. The same ‘‘failure’’ can also be explained as a characteristic of the innovation—that its up-front cost has to be borne by the individual—or by a community structural characteristic—the lack of affordable loans available in a community, or by a fixed individual characteristic, a reluctance to accept the risks involved in taking out a loan, or by a social process, the lack of models of adoption on nearby farms, or by a lack of confidence that the outcome will be a beneficial one. Sometimes there are differences of evidence to support one explanation or another; often it is a matter of perspective, or ideology, which drives the interpretation. The idea of the intra-individual process of adoption of