Factors Affecting the Citizens’ Trust in E-Government

Factors Affecting the Citizens’ Trust in E-Government

Hisham M. Alsaghier (Griffith University, Australia), Marilyn Ford (Griffith University, Australia), Anne Nguyen (Griffith University, Australia) and Rene Hexel (Griffith University, Australia)
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-789-3.ch011

Abstract

In e-government context, trust plays a vital role in helping citizens overcome perceived risks. Trust makes citizens comfortable sharing personal information, make online government transaction, and acting on e-Government advices. Thus, trust is a significant notion that should be critically investigated to help both researchers and practitioners to understand citizens’ acceptance to e-Government. Prior research in trust has focused mainly on consumer’s trust in e-Commerce. Most of existing literatures on trust in e-government focus on technical perspective such as PKI. This paper contributes by proposing a conceptual model of citizens’ trust in e-Government. The proposed conceptual model of citizens’ trust in e-government is integrated constructs from multiple disciplines: psychology, sociology, e-commerce, and HCI. The research is aimed also to develop items in order to measure the theoretical constructs in the proposed model. The pool of items is generated based on literature review. Q-Methodology has been utilised to validate the generated measurement items. The outcome of two Q-sorting rounds resulted in developing a survey instrument for proposed model with an excellent validity and reliability statistical results.
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Literature Review And Theoretical Background

Overview of E-Government

There are a number of e-government definitions in the existing literature. Most definitions of e-government revolve around the concepts of government’s employment of technology, in particular web-based application to improve the access and delivery of government services to citizens, business partners, and other government agencies. World Bank defines trust as “the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks the Internet, and mobile computing) that have ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government.” (World Bank Group, 2007)

Stages of E-Government Development

There are various stages of e-government development. According to (Howard, 2001; Lau, 2001), there are four major stages of e-government development:

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    Information Publishing: this is a basic form of e-government where government posts information on the official government websites. The presented information may include information about available public services, government contract, and government events.

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    Two-way Communication: in this stage citizens communicate with the government through the Internet and make simple requests. Usually, the information requested in not processed immediately online but sent to the requestor by mail or email.

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    Transaction: this stage is more sophisticated than previous stages where citizens can conduct all transactions online. Driving licence renewing is one example of these transactions.

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    Integration: this is the most sophisticated stage of e-government development. In this stage, all government services provided from different departments and agencies are integrated together and accessed through single website called e-government portal.

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