Relationships among computer use rates, computer user typologies, barriers to diffusion, and computer attitude level of college-based emergency medical services educators

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) educators are witnessing a rapid change in how EMS curricula are developed and distributed in their classrooms. Changes are occuring without any consideration of the computer use rate, barriers to computer use, user typologies, or computer attitudes of EMS educators. Investigations measuring these variables in EMS educators have not been completed.;This descriptive study investigated Everett M. Rogers's diffusion of innovation theory by exploring and comparing EMS educators' weekly amount of computer use, level of computer use in the EMS classroom, use of computer technologies, computer user typologies, the perceived barriers to computer use the reported types of computer attitude, and the associations between these factors and demographic and institutional variables. A survey was mailed to a stratified random sampling of 264 EMS educators from 439 college-based EMS programs.;The study followed the Dillman's Total Design Method for mail surveys. A total of 161 surveys (61%) were returned and 131 surveys (50%) were available for analysis. The study found that EMS educators most commonly use the computer for educational purposes between 21 and 30 hours per week, 51.9% of EMS educators report using technology in the classroom "infrequently", and 91.6% are using word processing software. Respondents selected a lack of time as their top ranked barrier to computer use, funds as the second ranked barrier, and software as the third ranked barrier. The majority (98.5%) of the respondents report a neutral computer attitude. All of the respondents, however, selected either the explorer or change agent computer user typology, suggesting a "wait and see" position with regard to the decision-making and implementation stages of diffusion. Statistically significant relationships were not found between computer use rates, user typologies, barriers, computer attitudes, and demographic and institutional variables. These results establish a database of EMS educator demographic information related to computer use and begins to identify the variables explaining computer use in EMS education.