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Research in psychology has found that predicting and describing human actions are difficult tasks. The difficulty comes from different causes that trigger human attitudes, such as physiological and environmental reasons, as well as many other factors, including political and social institutions around us. Many studies have pointed to a noticeable gap between the technical experience and background acquired by women compared to men in the field of information technology (Goswami & Dutta, 2015; Heilala et al., 2023; Yau & Cheng, 2012). According to these studies, men are more technologically tolerant and competent due to their dominance in professions. These studies and their statistics indicate that providing educational programs to overcome this issue is a challenge.
Furthermore, many theoretical frameworks have been developed to study human behavior. These frameworks are all designed to predict behavior based on different beliefs, such as the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) in psychology; the health belief model and the transtheoretical model (TTM) in health care; innovation resistance theory (D. Chakraborty, 2023) in e-commerce; and, in the field of information technology, theories such as the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the information systems (IS) success model in 1992 of DeLone and McLean (D&M). However, it is rare in the Middle Eastern literature to find behavioral models to examine female behavioral intention to use e-learning systems. Thus, our objective is to adopt a behavioral model through which we can examine female students’ behavioral intention to use e-learning systems. The behavioral literature has shown that one of the most influential theories in the field is the TPB (Ajzen, 1991). Since its introduction, a massive number of studies in many fields and contexts have confirmed the significance of the association between intention and behavior. For this purpose, we adopted the TPB as our theoretical background.
Concepts such as personality traits and social gatherings play core roles in defining human behavior. However, the general dispositions of such factors tend to be poor predictors of behavior in specific situations (Ajzen, 2002). Accordingly, the TPB performs relatively well in those situations. However, in specific situations it is clear that extensions of the theory are needed to modify the framework to fit the application. In this study, we use the TPB because of its confirmed successes in predicting behavior in many fields. At the same time, we modify the theory to be more appropriate in the context of the adoption of e-learning by women where information technology is the foundational component of the process. The motivation to use information technology is more common in people with innovative personalities compared to those who lack this trait. According to Rogers and Shoemaker (1971), innovation is the “degree to which an individual is relatively more ready to adopt an innovation than other members of their system.” Based on this statement, many studies have examined the importance of innovation to the intention of adopting information technology (Abbas et al., 2019).
Another fact that affects the motivation to use or not to use information technology is the quality standards of the system. The success model of DeLone and McLean (1992, 2003) for IS is one of the better-known theories in the field that have helped researchers to establish constructs that influence the behavior of IS users in general.