Correlational and Configurational Analysis of Factors Influencing Potential Patients’ Attitudes toward Surgical Robots : A Study in the Jordan University Community

Literature on the acceptance of surgical robots (SRs) usually adopts the heathcare workers’ perspective but research from patients’ perception is scarcer. This study fills this gap, by analysing patients’ attitudes towards SRs. It considers three variables from technology acceptance models: Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), and Social Influence (SI); two affective factors: Pleasure (PL), and Arousal (AR) and Perceived Risk (PR). Fuzzy set comparative qualitative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyse a survey from the university community of Jordan. All variables are relevant for explaining attitude. The sign of the relationship between explanatory factors and acceptance is positive in all the cases except for PR, which is present but also negated in several prime implicates. Resistance to SRs is always explained by the combination of the absence in PE, EE, SI, PL and the presence of PR. The explanation of SRs acceptance and rejection is asymmetrical