# Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality
## 4 Methodology
### Indicators  
For the indicators, two major parts (demographic enquiry and questions regarding to e-services adoption) have been settled. All the four major types of e-services in local districts have been investigated via questions answered by citizens regarding their adoption habits. These four types are \"Government website portal\", \"Government official app\", \"Weibo Government official account\", and \"WeChat Public Services\" (including government official account and city services platform)--marked as \"Website\" \"App\" \"Weibo\" and \"WeChat\" for short.  
Based on the literature review, \"age\", \"gender\", \"education\", and \"IT Literacy\" are recorded as demographic factors to examine the impacts of the digital divide regarding e-services adoption [5; 29; 30; 51; 52]. A factor called \"Chongqing residency\" is introduced in this research by asking whether respondents are Chongqing residents or not. The reason local residency being tested is that China has a binary household registration system (known as _hukou_), which separates the rural and urban populations not only in geographic terms but also in social, economic, and political terms [53]. As mentioned in Section 4.1, Chongqing is a central city receiving large swarms of its workforce from surrounding areas in the southwest--many people come from rural areas and are working and living there as non-residents. Local residency can be viewed as one kind of digital divide if there is gap between residents and non-residents on information access and e-services usage.  
As noted in the literature review, the research examines the variables of \"awareness\" \"intention to use\" \"satisfaction\" and \"adoption\" on four local e-services. The variables of \"intention to use\" and \"adoption\" derive from the series of TAM and its extensional models. \"Intention to use\" expresses citizens' behavioral intention to use e-government services (BI) while \"adoption\" represents citizens' actual behavior usage (AU) of the e-services. \"Awareness\" was surveyed by asking citizens \"How well do you know about this service?\", using the same structure as the items \"intention to use\", \"satisfaction\", and \"adoption\". Five-point Likert-type scales were used for the measurement of each question. The hypotheses to be tested are the following:  
**Hypothesis 1 (H1).**_Demographic factors have a significant impact on the adoption of e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat)_.  
**Hypothesis 1a (H1a).**_Older people are less likely to adopt e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat) than young people._  
**Hypothesis 1b (H1b).**_Men are more likely to adopt e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat) than women._  
**Hypothesis 1c (H1c).**_People who have local residency are more likely to adopt e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat) than non-residents._  
**Hypothesis 1d (H1d).**_Education levels will have a positive correlation with adoption of e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat)._  
**Hypothesis 1e (H1e).**_The level of IT literacy will have a positive correlation with adoption of e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat)._  
**Hypothesis 2 (H2).**_High awareness of services will lead to increased e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat) adoption._  
**Hypothesis 3 (H3).**_Intention to use will positively influence adoption of e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat)._  
**Hypothesis 4 (H4).**_Satisfaction has a positive impact on adoption of e-government services (Website/App/Weibo/WeChat)._