Attitude Measurement as Instrument to Predict Internet Usage

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are the most important way of getting in-formed in our society. Unfortunately not all people have access to the internet and ICTs (first or-der digital divide), and an amazingly large number of people do not have the abilities to use the ICTs in a proper way and, therefore, cannot draw advantages from its usage (second order digital divide). Clearly, whether people can be informed or not depends on access to the new media and the ability to use them. This paper shows that the variable attitude plays an important role in this context. Attitudes can serve as an important dimension when explaining the adoption and diffu-sion of new technologies. This paper presents data from a 2007 telephone survey in Austria and describes the attitude structure of users and non-users by means of a representative random sam-ple (N=529). The tripartite definition of attitudes serves as a useful heuristic in structuring the analysis. In providing new operationalizations, we found significant differences between users and non-users concerning their attitudes towards the internet and new technologies. Age and edu-cation prove to be major determinants of attitude patterns. The influence of the affective compo-nent has to be especially emphasized, not only when overcoming the initial obstacle of gettin