# Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality
## 4 Methodology
### Descriptive Statistics  
The demographic characteristics of the respondents in the survey are presented in Table 1 as below. The ages of the respondents ranged from 16 to 64 years old, with males accounting for 62.64% of the sample. It shows that men are overrepresented in the data. As for educational background, 56.53% of the respondents are educated beyond the high school level, of which three-year College is the highest proportion. As for IT literacy, 55.54% of the respondents have IT proficiency at or above the intermediate level while 14.71% are below the basic level. Lastly, 65.12% of the respondents are residents of Chongqing while the rest are non-residents. Figure 2 below shows that in general, among the four-major local e-services in Chongqing, people are using the government website portal most frequently, followed by WeChat public services and Weibo government official accounts. However, the government official app sees the most unpopular e-service application compared with others. How do different groups of citizens adopt these four types of e-services? Figures 3-6 illustrate the usage of e-services by people of diverse ages, genders, residency statuses, educational backgrounds and IT literacy levels. Figure 3 shows the level of adoption of e-services by people in different age groups. With an increase in age, there is more adoption of four local e-government services whereas it declined when people were over 60 years old. The adoption rate of services also differs within the \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Characteristic** & **No. (N = 605)** & **Percentage (\%)** \\ \hline
**Age (years)** & & & \\ \hline  & Under 20 & 75 & 12.40\% \\  & 21–30 & 191 & 31.57\% \\  & 31–40 & 121 & 20.00\% \\  & 41–50 & 119 & 19.67\% \\  & 51–60 & 89 & 14.71\% \\  & Over 60 & 10 & 1.65\% \\ \hline
**Gender** & & & \\ \hline  & Male & 379 & 62.64\% \\  & Female & 226 & 37.36\% \\ \hline
**Chongqing residency** & & & \\ \hline  & Resident & 394 & 65.12\% \\  & Non-resident & 211 & 34.88\% \\ \hline
**Education** (Highest educational level completed) & & & \\ \hline  & Elementary school & 31 & 5.12\% \\  & Junior high school & 85 & 14.05\% \\  & High school & 147 & 24.30\% \\  & Three-year college & 174 & 28.76\% \\  & Bachelor degree & 143 & 23.64\% \\  & Master degree and above & 25 & 4.13\% \\ \hline
**IT literacy** & & & \\ \hline  & Below basic & 89 & 14.71\% \\  & Basic & 180 & 29.75\% \\  & Intermediate & 180 & 29.75\% \\  & Proficient & 156 & 25.79\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Demographic Characteristics. Figure 2: Adoption of four types of local e-government services. same generation. For example, compared with the 41-50 years old group, people aged 51-60 maintain higher usage rates for mobile-oriented applications (government official app, Weibo government official accounts and especially WeChat public services), and express less favor for computer-oriented service (government website portal). Another interesting result is that people over 50 use WeChat services more than younger people. This may be because WeChat application has attracted older adults owing to its perceived \"low barrier\" user experience compared with other mobile applications [41]. This preference for the WeChat application may naturally lead older people to embrace embedded government services on the same platform. The result proves WeChat has made a contribution to promoting older adults' usage of government e-services by merging public needs into the commercial application with a streamlined design. In terms of gender and residency, Figure 4a illustrates that males have a higher adoption rate of local e-services in all of the four applications than females, though the gap shrank in the usage of the government website portals and the official app. The reason why women are less willing to adopt the Weibo e-service than men could be explained by observing the characteristics of the Weibo platform.