Construct · 6 names · 7 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
● jangle · six names, one construct Nearest construct by meaningresult demonstrabilitycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to trialability is result demonstrability.
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The degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis, one of Rogers's five perceived attributes that together explain most of the variance in rate of adoption. In the 1962 first edition the attribute was called divisibility, the extent to which a farmer could plant a new seed on one field before committing the farm; Rogers renamed it trialability in later editions so that it covered innovations that cannot be divided but can still be tried. The referent is the innovation as adopters perceive it, and the outcome is the adoption rate of a population, not one person's decision. Everything else on this map descends from these two sentences.[1][2]
The degree to which an innovation may be experimented with before adoption, Moore and Benbasat kept Rogers's wording and, in 1991, gave it items. They wrote candidate statements for each of Rogers's attributes, sorted them by judges, and tested them on personal-workstation users; trialability survived as its own subscale where observability did not. The items ask whether the respondent has had, and knows where to get, enough hands-on time with the technology. The referent shifts from the innovation to the individual's own opportunity to try it, and the outcome from a diffusion curve to one adopter's intention.[4]
The extent to which users perceive an opportunity to experiment with an innovation before committing to it, Agarwal and Prasad's 1997 field study of a new information technology, using the Moore and Benbasat subscales with perceived voluntariness added. Their result is the reason this field has its own node: trialability and visibility predicted initial use but not intention to continue using, while relative advantage and result demonstrability did the opposite. The construct is the same; its job in the model is split by stage of adoption, which no one upstream had tested.[5][4]
The practice of giving away a basic version of a software product so that users can try it before paying for a premium tier, Kumar's 2014 treatment set out when freemium works and how to tune the free-to-paid boundary. The word trialability rarely appears; the construct does, as a design decision made by the seller rather than a perception held by the adopter. The criterion is conversion rate from free to paid, and the trial is not a limited experiment but an indefinite state that most users never leave. This is the seller's side of what Rogers described from the adopter's side.[7]
Direct experience with a product before purchase, in consumer research a behaviour and an information source, not an attribute of the product. Kempf and Smith's 1998 structural model traced how a trial episode produces cognitive and affective responses, how those form beliefs and attitudes, and how prior advertising changes what the trial is taken to mean. Trial here is something the consumer does; the thing that varies is the quality of the experience and its diagnosticity, not whether trying was possible. Rogers's attribute is the precondition for this literature's independent variable.[6]
The degree to which an innovation can be tried on a limited basis before adoption, Tornatzky and Klein's 1982 meta-analysis coded seventy-five studies for ten innovation characteristics and found trialability among those most often measured but inconsistently related to adoption. Their harder finding was methodological: most studies asked about characteristics after adoption, in cross-section, and with no shared operationalisation, so the pooled effect for trialability was as much an artefact of study design as a property of innovations. Only compatibility, relative advantage, and complexity came out consistently. The name is Rogers's; the verdict on its evidence is theirs.[3]
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