Comparison of Internet Attitudes between Industrial Employees and College Students

Abstract

Most studies of attitudes toward the Internet have been focused on a single entity. There is a gap when it comes to comparative study of Internet attitudes between college students and employees in the workforce. This study explored Internet attitudes between two different samples—employees in the work force and college students on campus. Four Internet attitude subscales—namely, enjoyment, usefulness, anxiety, and self-efficacy—from 296 college students were compared with a sample from 680 industrial employees. Age differences were found in the enjoyment and self-efficacy subscales, where younger people expressed more enjoyment than older people with the exception of female college students. Younger people expressed more self-efficacy than the older people. Factorial ANOVA analyses detected statistically significant differences between two samples among all subscales. In general, industrial employees reported more positive attitudes than college students. The employees reported more enjoyable Internet experience, felt the Internet was more useful, had less anxiety, and had more self-efficacy on the Internet than college students. Female college students showed more positive attitudes than male students, and male employees showed more positive attitudes than female employees. Interaction effects of different sample groups, gender, and age were found to have significant differences in the Internet anxiety and self-efficacy subscales. Recommendations for future research on these types of comparisons were included.