# Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality
## 4 Methodology
### Descriptive Statistics
Since the Weibo government account is a more politics-dominated space, providing political news and discussion to citizens, women may be not actively participating because of their reduced interest in politics compared to men as some research has reported [54]. Local Residency has been imported as a new factor to test whether the digital gap has existed between local residents and non-residents. It was found that the _luukou_ system did create differences: local residents are far more engaged with e-government services than migrants in all of the applications (Figure 4b). Figure 4: Gender and Local residency differences on adoption of local e-government services: (**a**) Female and male in adoption of four services; (**b**) Local residents and non-residents in adoption of four services. Figure 3: Age and adoption of local e-government services. Education and IT literacy have been listed as demographic influences in the previous literature; Figures 5 and 6 offer a clear picture of people adopting e-government services throughout diverse educational backgrounds and experience with IT. In general, education and IT literacy do not affect people's usage of e-services as strongly as previous studies have found [55; 56; 57]. There are interesting findings that suggest that people who have bachelor degrees or were only educated at the elementary school level prefer to adopt government website portals rather than WeChat public services, while all the other groups have used WeChat most frequently. Meanwhile, people who have master's degrees and above show a higher frequency of use of WeChat than any other application. Overall, people educated at the elementary school level demonstrate far less usage of all the four types of e-services compared with other educational background groups. A similar situation has arisen in terms of the relationship between IT literacy and e-services adoption. Though people who claim they have poor IT skills below the basic level show the least usage of e-government services, the usage rates of all applications has declined among people who have the comparatively highest skills. Figure 5 demonstrates that though educational level may affect people's adoption of e-government services positively before high school, the influence fades away when people obtain higher education. In Figure 6, it shows that people who have higher level of IT literacy tend to use local e-government services more often, but the positive correlation terminates at the stage when people are proficient in IT. Both figures reveal that, at least in the context of local users in China, education and IT literacy are not the indispensable factors affecting people's adoption of e-government services as significantly as before. The significance of efforts to simplify e-services operations may be a contributing factor to this in that people do not have to learn complicated skills to use the e-platforms. Figure 5: Educational level and adoption of local e-government services. Figure 6: IT literacy and adoption of local e-government services.