Statistically Significant! But Is Trust of Practical Significance?

ABSTRACT

Trust, such as trust in a technology or believing that a technology has trustworthy utility, manifests its importance by affecting user behaviors toward information systems (IS). There is no dearth of evidence showing that the effect of trust is statistically “significant;” however, statistical significance, different from practical significance is nothing but a failure to reject the Fisherian null hypothesis and is complementary to practical significance. Motivated to investigate the practical significance of trust in affecting user behaviors toward IS, we review the literature to analyze the reported effect sizes of trust in IS research. Furthermore, we endeavor to interpret these differences as to how research context, trust measure, and dependent variable may differentiate trust effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• technology acceptance
• statistical significance
• practical significance
• effect size