1. Introduction
Citizens’ trust plays a significant role in the successful adoption of e-government [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8]. The existing studies already added trust into classic technology acceptance models (such as the technology acceptance model, IS success model, and information systems continuance model, and an extension of the unified model of electronic government adoption (UMEGA)) to analyze the impact of trust on the adoption of e-government from citizens’ perspectives. These studies achieved many reasonable conclusions. Some results indicated that trust has a direct influence on users’ adoption of e-government [
9,
10,
11,
12], while others showed that trust has an indirect impact on users’ adoption of e-government, such as performance expectations, effort expectations, as well as perceived risk generally is mediating variable between trust and e-government adoption [
13,
14,
15,
16,
17]. Others only explored the determinants of citizens’ trust in e-government [
18], which include government, technology, risk, and citizen factors [
19].
Trust is a dynamic concept, which is gradually developed and accumulated over time through the repetition of an action. Users’ experiences can modify the trust, and there is a feedback loop of trust-action-learning-trust that is repeated many times. Taking these ideas into account, Hernandez–Ortega (2011) considered two different phases of trust should be distinguished: pre-use trust and post-use trust. Pre-use trust influences users’ intention to adopt technology, while post-use trust influences the uses’ intention to continue to use the technology [
20]. Several studies in management and marketing described the phase of trust, either focusing on customers’ pre-use trust in online companies [
21] or on post-use trust in the acceptance of technology by a firm [
20]. However, a few papers explicitly described the phase that they are investigating or analyzed the role of pre-use trust or post-use trust in detail.
Concerning the current situation of e-government development in the Chinese mainland, in recent years, the Chinese government was vigorously building e-government or digital government to improve the government’s governance capabilities and to modernize governance. So far, most public sectors already transferred most of their services from offline to online and made great achievements. For instance, China’s national government service platform started running in 2019, which includes 3.68 million government service items from 46 state council departments, 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities), and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps [
22]. The report ‘United Nations E-Government Survey 2018′ stated that the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) of China is 0.6811, ranked 65th in the world. In 2020, the EGDI of China was 0.7948, jumping twenty spots to 45th in the world in only two years [
23,
24]. However, despite the rapid development of e-government in China, on one hand, it still faces numerous challenges such as internet security, government credibility, and service quality, which can influence citizens’ trust in e-government. On the other hand, how to encourage citizens to reuse e-government is very significant for the sustainable development of e-government.
Combining the existing theoretical research and the needs of e-government development practice, the purpose of this study is to analyzes citizens’ continuous-use intention from the perspective of post-use trust. Hence, we attempt to provide a validated conceptual framework that integrates different factors, including service characteristics, government agencies, privacy, and security as well as technology to investigate and analyze their impacts on citizens’ post-use trust in e-government and how post-use trust influences citizens’ continuous-use intention. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the next section reviews the relevant literature develops the research model and proposes hypotheses;
Section 3 covers the questionnaire development, data collection, and research methods;
Section 4 presents the data analysis.
Section 5 states the discussion of findings, and
Section 6,
Section 7 and
Section 8 highlight the paper’s contributions, practical implications as well as limitations, and possible directions for future research.
3. Methodology
After developing a conceptual framework and identifying the major hypotheses, a quantitative-based survey was designed and conducted to collect data. Since the purpose of this study is to examines the relationship between variables, a structural equation model was utilized to explain critical factors influencing citizens’ trust in e-government and to identify the impact of citizens’ post-use trust on perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and continuous-use intention.
The measurement items of all constructs of this study are borrowed from previous studies. In the Chinese e-government context, this study slightly modified some items. Since all items of this study were derived from English papers, literal translation and back translation were used. First, we translated items from English to Chinese, corrected them, and translated it from Chinese to English to make sure the content in English and Chinese did not change during translation.
Table 2 illustrates the constructs with their respective items and sources. Five-point Likert scales were adopted in this study to present the items of all constructs. A pretest was done using 10 doctoral students and 50 citizens to improve the quality of survey items. The final questionnaire includes the 10 scales, as well as demographics.
As the issue of trust in e-government is becoming more important in developing countries, this study was conducted in China, which is a developing country. E-government in China still faces many challenges that may influence citizens’ trust in it, and discussions are ongoing about how to encourage citizens to re-use e-government services. The sample selected for this study comprises residents from five cities in China—Chengdu, Changsha, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Shenzhen—with any prior experience in using e-government. There are some crucial reasons that we choose these five cities. The most is there is a policy background. Since 2005, the State Council of China has successively approved the establishment of 12 National Comprehensive Supporting Reform Pilot Zones, including Shanghai Pudong New Area, Tianjin Binhai New Area, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Yiwu, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan City Circle, Changzhutan City Group, Shenyang Economic Zone, the two plains of Heilongjiang Province, and Shanxi Province. These regions have greater policy advantages than other regions, and after more than ten years of development, they made greater progress in political, economic, and social development, and are representatives of China.
Table 3 shows location and administrative level of them. In this study, taking the location and administrative level into considerations comprehensively, 5 cities were selected as the area we collect the samples. These five cities are located in the eastern (Shanghai, Shenzhen, Shenyang), central (Changsha) and western (Chengdu) of China and better represent the development of Chinese e-government. Further, these five cities cover municipalities directly under the Central Government (Shanghai), provincial capital cities (Chengdu, Shenyang, Changsha), and subprovincial cities (Shenzhen). Simultaneously, these cities have multicultural characteristics and different social structures, which ensure the diversity of the samples of this study.
Referring to previous studies in this field of e-government adoption, a convenient sampling method was adopted. There are two ways to distribute questionnaires: offline and online. The disadvantage of the offline is that it consumes more time and money, and there is a risk of tampering with the data submission process. However, the offline format can ensure that the respondent has a better understanding of the content of the questionnaire, and the collected data can reflect the true perception of the respondent. The online has the advantages of less time and money. However, collecting data online may have some sample quality problems. There are two ways to send questionnaires online, one is sent by the researcher, to people they are familiar with. Since the researcher’s circle cannot cover all groups, this study did not consider it; the second is that data survey companies send questionnaire online to groups in their database. After consulting several companies, the samples databases of them were notably quite different; these samples mainly came from large cities, and it is mainly young people represent Chinese netizens.
Considering these two ways comprehensively, this study chose offline channel to distribute the questionnaire. Questionnaires were distributed in hard copy to residents who lived, worked, or studied in these five cities for a long time from May to August 2018. In the process of distributing the questionnaire, the investigator can explain the question at any time that the respondent does not understand or have any questions. To ensure that forms or data were not tampered with during the filling out or submission process, two measures were taken (1) the investigators in this study are all doctor candidates with research experience, and (2) they were trained before the distribution of the survey to ensure that they objectively explain the questionnaire and submit the data accurately.
Then, investigators randomly distributed questionnaires in densely populated places, such as parks, libraries, and crosswalks, and gave participants gifts as rewards to encourage them to fill in the questionnaire carefully. To ensure that the participants had previous experience in using e-government, the questionnaire designed a question ‘Have you used e-government before’. If participants answered ‘yes’, we kept the questionnaire. Otherwise, we deleted it.
5. Discussion
To explore the antecedents of post-use trust of e-government and how it affects the continuous-use intention of citizens, this study developed an integrated model that takes a multi-discipline approach and integrates several information technology acceptance models. Using data collected from a survey of 1867 citizen users living in five cities in China who had prior experience of using e-government services, this study verified that trust in government, trust in the internet, information quality, and service quality can influence citizens’ post-use trust in e-government. Post-use trust affects the continuous-use behavior through both mediated variables—perceived usefulness and satisfaction. In this section, the antecedents of post-use trust of e-government and continuous-use intention factors are discussed in the context of Chinese citizens.
Trust plays an important role in explaining users’ adoption of information technology. In the field of e-government, the existing research proved that trust has a vital influence on users’ use of e-government services [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8]. However, the existing research rarely distinguished pre-use trust from the post-use trust. This study highlights that the trust formed after citizens use e-government services, namely post-use trust, and selects citizens with experience of using e-government to administrate empirical research. The results show that the factors that affect the post-use trust include citizens’ trust in government, trust in the internet, the perception of service quality, and the information quality of e-government websites.
The relationship between trust in government, trust in the internet, and trust in e-government were explored in previous empirical studies [
6,
18]. Trust in government is the public’s belief that government can provide better services to them and make decisions that are beneficial to them. Trust in the internet, as institution-based trust, refers to the public’s belief that the internet is safe and that relevant laws and regulatory policies can protect them from risks, such as private information disclosure, hacker attack, the attack of malware, or phishing site. Some studies took trust in government and trust in internet as two dimensions of trust of e-government and explore their influence on users’ behavioral intention to use e-government [
15,
25,
45]. Some studies took trust in government and trust in internet as antecedent variables of citizens’ trust in e-government and analyze the impact of these two types of trust on the trust of e-government. These studies showed that trust in government and trust in the internet have a significant and positive effect on trust in e-government [
6,
13,
26]. The results of this study are consistent with their conclusions. The government is the main body that provides e-government services, and the internet is the carrier that delivers e-government services. The public’s level of trust in both can improve their level of trust in e-government because post-use trust is a type of trust in e-government.
Information quality, system quality, and service quality are important components of e-government service quality [
37]. The relationship between e-government service quality and e-government trust was discussed in previous studies. Teo et al.’s research pointed out that e-government trust affects the public’s evaluation of information quality, system quality, and service quality from the perspective of attribution theory, and their empirical research also proved that e-government trust has a positive and significant impact on these three quality subdimensions [
6]. Most other studies also revealed that these three quality subdimensions have a significant and positive impact on e-government trust [
5,
29]. The findings of this study support the latter conclusion. This study focuses on the influencing factors of post-use trust. Service quality, system quality, and information quality are important perceptions of users in the process of using e-government, which affect users’ evaluation of e-government websites. Trust in e-government is the citizens’ belief that e-government can provide high quality and reliable services, which is a kind of perception of value. Therefore, it is reasonable that service quality can affect post-use trust in the e-government context. But the finding of this study indicates information quality and service quality are more important than system quality. The path coefficient, between information quality and post-trust, service quality, and post-trust, are statistically significant, but the path coefficient of system quality to post-trust is not.
However, the findings of this study do not support the hypothesis ‘citizens’ perception of privacy and security negatively influence their post-use trust of e-government’. The perception of privacy and security refers to the degree to which the public feel their privacy is threatened in the process of using e-government services. Previous studies showed that the public’s awareness of privacy and security significantly affect their trust in e-government [
2,
13,
18,
29,
30]. The conclusion of this study is not consistent with previous studies. This may be two reasons: firstly, almost all Chinese e-government websites are provided by the government. Due to the endorsement of the government, the public has a weak perception of the risks of e-government services, and they are more inclined to believe that there is a free risk of privacy exposure when they are using government websites; secondly, the public’s awareness of privacy protection is relatively weak in China, and they may be less sensitive to whether personal privacy information is exposed.
How does the post-use trust of e-government affect the citizens’ intention to continue using e-government is the second research question of this study. Few existing studies focus on this issue. One study focused on the impact of e-government trust on the adoption of e-government from a business perspective [
30], and another study focused on how government adoption varies among users of different gender, age, and internet experiences [
5]. These studies provided some preliminary conclusions for understanding this question, but which rarely explain the influence mechanism of citizens’ post-use trust and their intention to reuse e-government services. This study shows that the post-trust of e-government services can affect the citizens’ intention to continuously use e-government through two paths: one is the pursuit of benefits, and the other is the pursuit of psychological satisfaction. After citizens use e-government websites, the initial trust of e-government is modified, which influences the users’ perception of the usefulness of the e-government, and then affects the users’ intention to continue using it. At the same time, post-use trust also affects the citizens’ satisfaction with e-government, which further affects their intention to continue using it.
Finally, it is worth noting that a relationship exists between users’ perception of usefulness and satisfaction. The results of this study show that usefulness affects satisfaction, which is consistent with the literature [
27], but previous also research results showed that satisfaction affects usefulness [
30]. There may be a two-way causal relationship between perceived usefulness and satisfaction, which needs to be further verified by future research.
6. Contributions
This study provides some significant contributions to the research on the role of trust in e-government adoption. First, the focus of this study is citizens’ post-use trust, which is rarely explored in the e-government adoption field. As stated in the literature review, most prior relevant research examines the role of trust in citizens’ e-government adoption based on TAM, IS succeed model, PBT, and UTAUT. These studies either analyzed the impact of trust on citizens’ behavioral intention or the effect of trust on core constructs in the above models [
6,
11]. However, these studies rarely investigated pre-use trust and post-use trust. Building from previous studies, this study highlights the post-use trust and analyzes the crucial factors that influence it. This study fills a gap in scholarship by testing and validating the influencing factors of post-use trust in the area of e-government adoption from citizens’ perspectives.
More importantly, this study develops an integrated model by incorporated factors that influence citizens’ post-use trust in e-government, the IS success model, and IS continuance model. IS success model is widely used in explaining the success of information systems in business and IS continuance model is used in explaining customers’ purchasing behaviors. Hence, by combining theories in an interdisciplinary way, this study makes a second contribution: a comprehensive framework was developed for understanding the role of post-use trust in citizens’ e-government continuous-use. Based on the research framework proposed in the latest studies [
5,
13,
30] and use situation of e-government, the research framework of this study modified the factors that influence citizens’ post-use trust, which include trust in government, trust in the internet, service characteristics and risk, and then revised the outcomes of post-use trust, which include perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and continuous-use intention. This research not only contributes to the operationalization of e-government, but also deepens theoretical understanding of the process of trust production and how trust affects public e-government continuous-use.
Lastly, this study expands the application scope of the IS success model and the IS continuance model for analyzing users’ continuous e-government adoption. Prior studies stated that the IS success model is more suitable for e-government research of IS projects, their studies updated the model by adding other factors, such as government agency, risk, and citizens’ aspects [
5]. This study refers to these factors and analyzes the collected data by using a structural equation model. Although the results of this study are not consistent with previous studies, the applicability of the model is verified. Similarly, the IS continuance model is rarely used to research citizens’ e-government adoption. This study employs this model by referring to an existing study [
30] and verified the proposed model through the questionnaire survey data. As mentioned, the existing studies paid more attention to explain citizens’ intention to use e-government, whereas there is insufficient research on continued use [
36]. Therefore, the third contribution of this study is that it verified the applicability of the IS success model and the IS continuance model in the e-government adoption field and provides some theoretical perspectives to analyze citizens’ continuous e-government adoption.