Abstract

User beliefs and attitudes are key perceptions driving information technology usage. These per-ceptions, however, may change with time as users gain first-hand experience with IT usage, which, in turn, may change their subsequent IT usage behavior. This paper elaborates how users be-1Ritu Agarwal was the accepting senior editor for this paper. liefs and attitudes change during the course of their IT usage, defines emergent constructs driving such change, and proposes a temporal model of belief and attitude change by drawing on expectation-disconfirmation theory and the extant IT usage literature. Student data from two longi-tudinal studies in end-user computing (computer-based training system usage) and system devel-opment (rapid application development software usage) contexts provided empirical support for the hypothesized model, demonstrated its generali-zability across technologies and usage contexts, and allowed us to probe context-specific diffe-rences. Content analysis of qualitative data vali-dated some of our quantitative results. We report that emergent factors such as disconfirmation and satisfaction are critical to understanding changes in IT users beliefs and attitudes and recommend that they be included in future process models of IT usage.