Designing a Model for the Acceptance of Innovation-based Health Services with a Mixed-Method Exploratory ‎Approach

This research aimed to design a model for the acceptance of new health services based on the mixed-method exploratory analysis. In the qualitative part, the emerging design of grounded theory was used. The required data of qualitative part were obtained through 18 in-depth interviews with marketing professors and medical experts, and also 20 interviews with the customers of the Royan Institute’s Cord Blood Bank. The data were analyzed through open coding. To examine the validity of the qualitative part, the processes of member-checking, peer-checking, and triangulation were used and inter-coder reliability and test-retest were applied to measure its reliability. The final conceptual model was designed with 7 major categories (including the quality of services, the characteristics of services, perception of acceptors, individual factors, innovation features, reference groups, and sources of information), 22 subcategories, and 93 concepts. The findings obtained in the qualitative phase resulted in the development of 7 scientific propositions that were analyzed in the quantitative part. In the quantitative part, the researcher’s 93-item questionnaire was used in order to gather the data from 404 customers of the Royan Institute’s Cord Blood Bank through simple random sampling. Convergent validity, discriminant validity, and Cronbach's alpha were used to measure the validity and reliability of this part. The data were tested using structural equation modeling. Measures of goodness of fit showed that the factor structure of the designed model was suited to the data and the model was confirmed.