Intrusive Smart Home Assistants: An Exploratory Study and Scale Development

Despite having many useful capabilities, more recently smart home assistants (SHAs) have also raised negative feelings and doubts which may cause resistance among potential users. However, current research has neither examined SHAs from the perspective of resistance nor its specific drivers (inhibitors). We address this gap and adopt a mixed-method research design with two studies that build on each other. Study 1 (N=10) elicits the belief structures underlying resistance to SHAs. Study 2 (N=276) builds on these findings and delves deeper into the understanding of one novel identified inhibitor, namely “perceived intrusion”, by taking initial strides towards creating a measurement instrument. Our results contribute to the previously under-researched “dark side” of smart consumer IT by examining the phenomenon of resistance. This way, we hope to inspire future research to expand on our findings, as well as apply our measurement instrument in other smart product contexts.