Web Usage Among Hispanics In The South Florida Region

Abstract

The establishment of LAOL by America Online to cater to the Hispanics in the U.S. attests to the growing importance of the Hispanic consumers to corporations. The Hispanic market in the U.S. offers promising and lucrative online business opportunities. Spain’s Terra Network, one of the biggest online content and access providers in the Latin countries, has teamed up with New Jersey based IDT to provide access to U.S. Hispanics (Folpe, 2000). Sears, Roebuck & Company plans to offer Internet sales on its Spanish language website to take advantage of this growing market. Approximately, 13 million households and 2.3 million Hispanic small businesses are using the Web. Still, little published research exists documenting the evaluation and usage of Web by this growing segment of the US population. Applying the gratification and avoidance approach used in the prior studies of media usage and Korgaonkar and Wolin’s seven-factor Web gratification model, the authors explore the Hispanic Web consumers’ use of the Web. The gratification factors <as well as demographic factors of the Hispanic respondents were studied in three usage contexts of the Web: (1) the number of hours per day spent on the Web, (2) the percent of time spent using the Web for business and personal purposes, and (3) if the subjects in the past 12 months made purchases or not from the Web. Multivariate discriminant analysis suggests that the gratification factors along with age, education, and income levels, are significantly correlated with the three usage contexts of the Web. The study results and implications for managers are discussed.