Determinants that Influence Citizen's Usage of Different E-Government Services: A Malaysian Case Study

Abstract

For the past two decades, e-government has become a part of government’s development programmes throughout the world. With the availability of e-government, public services can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Governments have put a lot of resources into implementing e-government platforms. Technology adoption scholars have paid serious attention towards understanding the factors that influence citizens’ usage of online services. However, despite the enormous research efforts that have been put forth and the use of egovernment services that has been examined widely, e-government services offered by the government agencies often remain underutilised. Malaysia has successful cases of implementing e-government services. However, a recent study about e-government adoption in Malaysia indicated that it was growing slowly with a low rate of adoption. Moreover, several studies also found that citizens were more likely to use e-information services than e-payment services, even with both services were offered online in the same webpage. As such, it is reasonable for this study to understand the reasons e-information usage was higher compared to e-payment services in e-government services.Evidence demonstrates that the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) conceptual model has been successfully employed to explain technology adoption by citizens. Furthermore, the predictors in these models have been validated by prior studies in various settings. By considering a variety of types and levels of e-government services, the present study is significant in that it examines the citizens’ attitudes towards different e-government system use. Thus, this study was conducted with the aim to identify the predictor factors in the usage of different e-government services and functions by: i) examining the main factors that influence usage of different e-government services (i.e., income tax, property tax, and traffic fines); and ii) identifying the factors leading to the usage between e-informational and e-payment services.This study involved two stages. First, interviews with participants that had used government online services were undertaken as a scoping study to get opinion about citizens’ attitudes about using e-government services. After using a template analysis, five factors were identified to be relevant in the Malaysian context: Relative Advantage; Effort Expectancy; Social Influence; Perceived Trust; and Perceived Risk. Following from the scoping study, the UTAUT model was modified for this study. The second stage involved a web-based survey to collect data from 294 Malaysian citizens in Selangor who had used at least one e-government service in the past two years. As the main objective of this study was to identify the factors associated with technology use, multiple linear regressions were utilised. Statistical software package STATA version 14 was used to analyse the relationship between the predictors and the outcome variables. As the main objective of this study was to identify the drivers of technology adoption, regression analyses were utilised. As the study involved six different e-government services, the research findings provided varied results according to the type of services. This study confirmed that Effort Expectancy was found to be the most common factor associated with e-government usage for all services under study. This implied that the ease of use and easy to learn of e-services was found to be relevant reasons for citizens to use the service. The findings also show that Perceived Risk was consistently associated with e-services usage, and indicating that this factor was also common in explaining the citizens’ usage on e-government services. Finally, as the newest service, the traffic fines system use was associated with Social Influence and Relative Advantage factors, indicating that peers’ opinions and citizens perceived on the benefits of the online service are important to attract citizens to use the online service.In addition, research findings identified differences in drivers between e-information and e-payment services. For e-information, Effort Expectancy and Perceived Risk were identified as dominant factors associated with the citizen’s usage for both type of e-services. While, Relative Advantage and Social Influence were also identified to be associated with traffic fines services. For e-payment services, interestingly, the effect of the factors that influenced the citizens’ usage of e-government services were slightly different with e-information service. Besides the Effort Expectancy and Social Influence factors, Relative Advantage also was found to be associated but in selected e-services.The current study has significant empirical and practical contributions. Empirically, it contributes to the body of knowledge as this study provides a model that explains the different determinants of different e-services usage by citizens. Further, by integrating the UTAUT model with new constructs retrieved from a scoping study, a variation of citizens’ usage in different settings of systems were identified. As practical implications, the research identified the main determinants leading to users to adopt e-government services. Furthermore, due to limited resources, it is crucial for governments in developing countries to understand the important determinants that lead to the usage of e-government services.