Evaluating and Designing Electronic Government for the Future

This paper uses data from a program of customer interviews and focus group research conducted by the Australian government to develop an electronic services evaluation and design framework. A proven theory building approach has been used to develop and confirm the various components of electronic government (e-government) use and satisfaction from original government studies conducted in Australia and to create the new evaluation framework. Building on the extant e-government literature, the reintroduction of the original data into the framework yielded some emergent observations and insights for future e-government design, including the somewhat paradoxical importance of human contacts and interactions in electronic channels, service efficiency and process factors that impinge on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and a potential growth trajectory for telephony based e-government for older segments of the community.

What does it mean to trust facebook?

Researchers have recently studied technology trust in terms of the technological artifact itself. Two different kinds of trusting beliefs could apply to a website artifact. First, the trusting beliefs may relate to the interpersonal characteristics--competence, integrity, and benevolence. Second, they may relate to corresponding technology characteristics--functionality, reliability, and helpfulness. Since social networking websites like Facebook may demonstrate either interpersonal or technology trust characteristics, researchers may need to carefully choose the beliefs to model. Thus it is important to understand not only the conceptual meaning of these beliefs, but also whether human and technology trust beliefs are distinct. Using data collected from 362 university-student Facebook users, we test two second-order factor structures that represent alternative ways to model the three interpersonal and three technology trust beliefs. We find that the best-fitting measurement model depicts the three conceptually-related pairs of trust beliefs (competence-functionality, integrity-reliability, and benevolence-helpfulness) as three distinct second-order factors. This model outperformed the model splitting trusting beliefs into separate interpersonal and technology second-order factors. The results show people distinguish among three types of conceptually-related trust attributes, and that they trust Facebook as both a technology and a quasi-person. These second-order trust factors can be used in future research to better understand social networking trust and usage continuance intentions

Construct Validity Assessment in IS Research

Valid and reliable measures are critical to theory development as they facilitate theory testing in empirical research. Efforts in scale development have been put on ensuring aspects of validity. In this paper, the authors address a specific topic of construct validity assessment in scale development. Using data from the five leading IS journals between 1989-2008, in this paper, the authors determine if and how the field has advanced in construct validity assessment. Findings suggest that the proportion of studies reporting construct validity had increased and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and Multi-Trait Multi-Method (MTMM) were the three most common methods of construct validity assessment. The authors also apply a popular method from psychology and exemplify how the correlation analysis technique can be used to measure construct validity.

Engagement in E-learning opportunities: an empirical study on patient education using expectation confirmation theory

Medical e-learning technology is widely employed to create an online platform for patients and healthcare providers alike. However, there are few studies that have investigated the reasons why some users reject e-learning technology usage after their initial experience. This study was conducted with the aim to better understand the factors leading to patients' continued usage of e-learning technologies. The theoretical foundation was based on the expectation-confirmation theory (ECT). The questionnaire survey was conducted during a two-month period and covered a total sample of 281 outpatients in a regional-teaching hospital. We found that the intention to continue e-learning usage was significantly related to patients' education level, expectation, perceived performance, confirmation and satisfaction. The use of this ECT model may provide administrators in the healthcare industry insights into the implementation of e-learning technologies. This research also opens up a new direction and enhances the completeness of related researches in the fields of medical informatics and health education.

ZeGo: Development and Validation of a Short Questionnaire to Measure User Satisfaction with e-Government Portals

In recent years, electronic services delivered via the World Wide Web have become increasingly important to governments. Substantial investments have been made to provide crucial services and information to citizens, businesses, and governmental institutions. This paper presents the development of a short questionnaire to measure user satisfaction with e-Governmental portals. After two validations of the instrument with federal e-Governmental portals in Switzerland, a final set of 15 items remained that were tested with 2498 participants. The final version showed high internal consistency (Cronbach's ) of .91, good item difficulties (.51 to .82), and discriminatory power coefficients (.49 to .81), as well as a moderate average homogeneity of .47. The survey was translated into five languages.