Abstract
Public service producers are heavily investing in the development and implementation of more efficient new digital channels to engage users in citizen sourcing efforts, such as the reporting of public service-related issues. Nevertheless, user-reporters have continued to favor earlier implemented channels including traditional (e.g., phone, office) and e-government channels (e.g., web, email) over new digital channels such as m-government channels (e.g., mobile applications). Drawing on channel choice literature and theories, this study aims at explaining users' reporting behavior by examining the role of users' personal factors, including digital divide determinants, users' service experience, and channel satisfaction. We use a combination of survey and log data on actual reporting behavior among smart bike-sharing users to explain users' channel choice. Using a multinomial logistic regression, we found that the digital divide predicts user-reporters' channel choice. Moreover, user-reporters with a longer service membership favor traditional and e-government channels, over the newly implemented m-government channels. Finally, user-reporters' satisfaction with the mobile application is negatively associated with the user-reporters' choice of traditional and e-government channels. Our results expand and update the empirical evidence on channel choice at the user level, and provide insights for public service producers who aim at enhancing public service delivery through digital users' engagement.
Highlights
Over the last decades, citizens have been gaining a more active role in the functioning of their government, shifting from mere clients or customers to contributors, co-producers or active knowledge producers (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018; Linders, 2012)
Digital divide studies argue that women are in a disadvantaged position compared to men concerning the use of digital channels due to aspects related to education, tradition and culture, economic inequality, and ICT design
Channel satisfaction is expected to be positively associated with channel use preference (Devaraj, Fan, & Kohli, 2002). In light of these observations and previous channel choice studies (e.g., Ebbers, Jansen, & van Deursen, 2016; Reddick, 2017), we argue that user-reporters’ satisfaction with the m-government channel is positively related to the choice of the m-government channel compared to the prior implemented traditional and e-government channels
Summary
Citizens have been gaining a more active role in the functioning of their government, shifting from mere clients or customers to contributors, co-producers or active knowledge producers (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018; Linders, 2012). CET, on the other hand, aims to improve and expand this theory, and argues that the properties of channels are not fixed but rather constructed through users’ experi ences, that will in turn allow them to choose the channels for a broader range of tasks (Carlson & Zmud, 1999; Pieterson, 2009) In their most recent study, Pieterson and Ebbers (2020) examine the influence of tasks and users’ personal factors across different datasets from 2007 and 2018 on users’ channels’ preferences and use. They observed that users prefer to use e-government channels, in most cases, they found that users’ shift from traditional to digital channels can mainly be explained by users’ experience and characteristics. We aim to dive into this assumption by examining the role of users’ personal factors on users’ channel choice for a specific task: users’ reporting behavior
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