Adoption and use of statistical software support in higher education: a cross-national analysis

Abstract

The databases’ information and associated analytical approaches are gaining an ever-greater role in making business decisions, thus increasing the need for highly educated employees with good expertise of statistical support software that provides support for analysis of complex databases. This article presents a cross-national analysis regarding the adoption and use of statistical support software SPSS in higher education among students from Slovenia, Malaysia and Turkey. We present a conceptual model, based on TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) and we compared it in different national contexts. The conceptual model was tested using SEM (structural equation modeling). Despite different cultural and geographical differences, we found that the three models as a whole do not significantly differ, however, vary considerable differences between individual constructs by countries were identified. Students from Malaysia and Turkey are perceiving greater benefits of using of SPSS in future, show greater compatibility of SPSS with the academic needs, and have more positive attitude towards the use of SPSS as well as higher perceived usefulness of statistics as students from Slovenia.