Citizens' Willingness to Adopt Digital Contact Tracing Applications: Findings from a mixed methods study in Norway

Abstract

Context: Early 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic began to spread globally. Digital contact tracing (DCT) applications began development soon after to help mitigate the spread and contain this major crisis. In Norway, the application Smittestopp was developed to fulfill the role as a digital solution. With a poor launch and little enforcement, less than half of the population downloaded the application. This experience should be explored further by the Norwegian government, in order to ensure successful digital solutions in the future.

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore Norwegians citizens’ willingness to adopt Smittestopp, and if privacy concerns and human emotions affected these intentions. The way we measured this was by looking at how; 1) privacy concerns, risk beliefs, trusting beliefs and relative advantage impacts intention to use Smittestopp and 2) if human emotions moderate the effects of these relations, thus, impacting intention to use Smittestopp.

Methods: Our mixed methods research consisted of expanding an existing literature review and conducting a quantitative survey with a questionnaire. To complement the questionnaire data, follow-up interviews were also conducted. The literature review served as a theoretical foundation for our research, providing an overview of existing research on DCT-applications. A research model was adopted from a previous study examining Australian citizens' willingness to adopt the COVIDSafe-app. 9 hypotheses were developed to test suggested construct relations. The questionnaire was developed in SurveyXact by adopting questions from the aforementioned research paper, adjusting it for our research with the inclusion of human emotions. We received 189 valid responses to the distributed questionnaire, and made an interview guide aiming to complement and verify these responses further. We performed interviews with 11 volunteers from the questionnaire. The questionnaire data was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS. The interview transcripts were analyzed using Quirkos; a Computer-assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS).

Results: All 9 hypotheses were validated and supported through an analysis of the questionnaire data. These findings were later complemented by interview data, which verified most of the hypotheses but also brought interesting and contradictory results. Most notably, relative advantage significantly increased intention to use. Also, privacy concerns increased risk beliefs, trusting beliefs decreased risk beliefs, and intention to use increased actual use.

Conclusion: We concluded that privacy concerns, trusting beliefs, risk beliefs and relative advantage affected citizens’ intentions to use DCT-applications. Emotions moderate both relative advantage and risk beliefs relations into intention to use. The findings explain why Smittestopp was barely used, and how future digital solutions can learn from this.

Keywords: Digital contact tracing, COVID-19, information privacy concerns, trusting and risk beliefs, relative advantage, human emotions, Smittestopp, e-governance, mixed methods.