A Personal Resource for Technology Interaction: Development and Validation of the Affinity for Technology Interaction (ATI) Scale

TLDR

Successful coping with technology is essential for mastering daily life. The study proposes the Affinity for Technology Interaction (ATI) as a key personal resource for coping with technology. The authors developed a concise 9‑item, unidimensional ATI scale based on the need‑for‑cognition construct. In over 1,500 participants, the ATI scale demonstrated good‑to‑excellent reliability and strong correlations with geekism, technology enthusiasm, need for cognition, self‑reported technical problem‑solving success, system learning success, and system usage, while showing only weak associations with the Big Five, supporting its use for characterizing user diversity and building general models of user‑technology interaction.

Abstract

Successful coping with technology is relevant for mastering daily life. Based on related conceptions, we propose affinity for technology interaction (ATI), defined as the tendency to actively engage in intensive technology interaction, as a key personal resource for coping with technology. We present the 9-item ATI scale, an economical unidimensional scale that assesses ATI as an interaction style rooted in the construct need for cognition (NFC). Results of multiple studies (n > 1500) showed that the scale achieves good to excellent reliability, exhibits expected moderate to high correlations with geekism, technology enthusiasm, NFC, self-reported success in technical problem-solving and technical system learning success, and also with usage of technical systems. Further, correlations of ATI with the Big Five personality dimensions were weak at most. Based on the results, the ATI scale appears to be a promising tool for research applications such as the characterization of user diversity in system usability tests and the construction of general models of user-technology interaction.