An integrative analysis of transactional e -government web usage: The trust -risk model and Technology Acceptance Model perspectives

With the advancement of technology and the expansion of wired or wireless networks utilized in our daily lives, privacy and trustability of transaction media are highly cherished values. Individuals often make choices in which they surrender a certain degree of privacy in exchange for outcomes that are perceived to be worth the risk of information disclosure. This dissertation attempts to expand the utility of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a strongly supported and well-established vehicle in information research, by incorporating an individual’s privacy concerns, perceived risk, and trust factor that were previously regarded as separate research areas from TAM. A new proposed model was tested using data gathered from an internet survey. A total of two thousand e-mail invitations were sent out to anonymous general citizens in the Republic of Korea. 432 responses were analyzable out of 459 total returned responses (a 22.95% return rate). Structural equation modeling (SEM) using Mplus 3.0 was employed to validate measurement and the structural model. The results of SEM indicated both a measurement component and a structural component of the underlying model were plausible. Based on the adequacy of overall model fit, the study was able to further test the proposed hypotheses. The test results reveal that citizens are more willing to involve transactional e-government services when they have greater overall trust belief toward e-government web sites and government itself. Perceived risk also plays an influential role by mediating the personal disposition factor, an individual’s privacy concern, on trust. As one of the first studies to incorporate the trust-perceived risk model and TAM together, the present study contributes to expanding the utilization of e-government services and increasing the possibility of its adoption to the general public