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This study aims to develop a comprehensive adoption model that combines constructs from various theories and tests these theories against each other. The study combines a technology acceptance model, innovation diffusion theory and risk theory. It develops this model in a smart home applications context.

The study is based on an online survey consisting of 409 participants, and the data are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Each theory provides unique insights into technology acceptance and numerous constructs are interrelated. Predictors from innovation diffusion and risk theory often display indirect effects through technology acceptance variables. The study identifies risk perception as a major inhibitor of use intention, mediated through perceived usefulness. Results reveal that the most important determinants of use intention are compatibility and usefulness of the application.

Studies which do not examine different theories together may not be able to detect the indirect effects of some predictors and could falsely conclude that these predictors do no matter. The findings emphasize the crucial role of compatibility, perceived usefulness and various risk facets associated with smart homes.

This study broadens the understanding about the necessity of combining acceptance and adoption drivers from several theories to better understand the usage of complex technological systems such as smart home applications.

This study aims to understand master’s students’ experiences of service-learning, following their participation in a workshop with local social innovators whose activities had contributed to combating poverty in East Africa and to determine how this participation affected work on the students’ theses. The authors also explored possible gender differences in this context.

The study was based on pretest–posttest mixed methods research design. Data were collected from master’s students within the social sciences and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, respectively, in Kenya and Uganda, via surveys and interviews before the workshop, immediately afterwards and six months later.

Students’ immediate experience was that the workshop contributed to increased critical awareness, adoption of transdisciplinary community-serving approaches and strengthened self-confidence. Six months later, most had related their projects to social problems (e.g. poverty) in their communities. Moreover, the results motivated integration of gender-sensitive curricula based on service-learning in East Africa.

Based on the results, the authors suggest a framework for gender-sensitive curriculum development that can stimulate service-learning in master’s students. Implementation of such a curriculum could eventually contribute to community development, including, e.g. poverty reduction.

Studies on service-learning are rare in Africa, especially in postgraduate education. Gender-sensitive studies on service-learning are generally scarce and the same holds for studies on encouraging STEM students to integrate social innovation into their thesis work. By combining these aspects, this study presents an original contribution to existing research.

This study aims to take a dual-process perspective and argues that peer influence on increasing impulse buying may also operate automatically. If-then plans, which can automate action control, may, thus, help regulate peer influence. This research extends existing literature explicating the deliberate influence of social norms.

Study 1 (N = 120) obtained causal evidence that forming an implementation intention (i.e. an if-then plan designed to automate action control) reduces peer impact on impulse buying in a laboratory experiment with young adults (students) selecting food items. Study 2 (N = 686) obtained correlational evidence for the role of norms, automaticity and implementation intentions in impulse buying using a large sample of high-school adolescents working on a vignette about clothes-shopping.

If-then plans reduced impulse purchases in the laboratory (Study 1). Both reported deliberation on peer norms and the reported automaticity of shopping with peers predicted impulse buying but an implementation intention to be thriftily reduced these links (Study 2).

This research highlights the role of automatic social processes in problematic consumer behaviour. Promising field studies and neuropsychological experiments are discussed.

Young consumers can gain control over automatic peer influence by using if-then plans, thereby reducing impulse buying.

This research helps understand new precursors of impulse buying in understudied European samples of young consumers.