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Top2. Background
Adoption of any innovation, such as end-user programming, normally consists of a series of stages: knowledge of the innovation, persuasion to consider it, decision to try it, implementation of that evaluation, and confirmation to continue (Rogers, 2010). At each stage, a potential user could choose to move forward or to remain, in response to whatever incentives are perceived to be offered by use of the innovation. Not all users choose to move forward.
Motivations play the key role in determining this choice. “Motives are modifiers of incentives—this is, if the incentive value of a given consequence is of a certain absolute strength, it will be more attractive to a person with a high motive for that consequence, and less attractive to a person with low motive for that consequence” (Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981).
Such motivations stand in contrast to barriers that inhibit the use of an innovation. The current paper does not examine the barriers that inhibit end-user programming primarily because many barriers arise from the nature of the programming tools, whose relative strengths and weaknesses have already been reviewed and discussed at length (Ko, et al., 2011) (Lieberman, Paterno, Klann, & Wulf, 2006).