Perceived usefulness, personal experiences, risk perception and trust as determinants of adoption of e-government services in The Netherlands

Recently Dutch government, as well as many other governments around the world, has digitized a major portion of its public services. With this development electronic services finally arrive at the transaction level. The risks of electronic services on the transactional level are more profound than at the informational level. The public needs to trust the integrity and ‘information management capacities’ of the government or other involved organizations, as well as trust the infrastructure and those managing the infrastructure. In this process, the individual citizen will have to decide to adopt the new electronic government services by weighing its benefits and risks. In this paper, we present a study which aims to identify the role of risk perception and trust in the intention to adopt government e-services. In January 2003, a sample of 238 persons completed a questionnaire. The questionnaire tapped people’s intention to adopt e-government electronic services. Based on previous research and theories on technology acceptance, the questionnaire measured perceived usefulness of e-services, risk perception, worry, perceived behavioural control, subjective norm, trust and experience with e-services. Structural equation modelling was used to further analyze the data (Amos) and to design a theoretical model predicting the individual’s intention to adopt e-services. This analysis showed that the perceived usefulness of electronic services in general is the main determinant of the intention to use e-government services. Risk perception, personal experience, perceived behavioural control and subjective norm were found to significantly predict the perceived usefulness of electronic services in general, while trust in e-government was the main determinant of the perceived usefulness of e-government services.