Introduction: Technological progress has increased rapidly and electronic payments are rapidly becoming part of our daily lives. The use of electronic financial transactions in schools has also rapidly increased. Many schools have started utilizing e-receipts and e-payments to provide faster and more convenient service to organizational stakeholders, and they have already developed guidelines to enhance internal control practices and minimize the risk of fraudulent use of these transactions. This research explored the use of electronic payments by selected Seventh-day Adventist International Schools in Thailand and investigated the factors that affected parental perceptions of these payments.
Methods: A Descriptive Research Design approach was utilized. Questionnaires and interviews were used to collect the data. A statistical software package was used to analyze the data, and stepwise multiple regression was applied to test the hypotheses. The 319 parents who had previously made electronic payments to the schools and eight Finance Department staff members at the schools were selected as respondents.
Results: The results indicated that the factors of benefits, trust, self-efficacy, ease of use, and security were rated at the “High” level. The highest mean score was the factor of benefits (4.16), followed by self-efficacy (3.91), ease of use (3.89), trust (3.81), and security (3.55), respectively. Also, all factors – except for self-efficacy – were related to parental perceptions of e-payments at the 0.05 level of significance. Findings from the group interviews of the finance staff at each school revealed that the factors of ease of use, trust, security, and benefits affected their perceptions of electronic transaction especially the payments, both receiving and disbursing funds.
Discussion: In order to enhance the accuracy and generalizability of these findings, collection of larger sample sizes across different locations could be considered for future studies, perhaps from other private international schools.
Organization and Parental Perceptions of Electronic Payments by Selected Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) International Schools in Thailand
