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an exit mechanism for them and promote labor transfer by<br />

improving their information capabilities and employability, and<br />

thus to diminish the gap between urban citizens and them and<br />

promote their social integration [ 14 ]. As a seminal work,<br />

Construct an Integrated Information Service System for Migrant<br />

Farmer Workers [15], the report of the National Informatization<br />

Expert Committee in 2005 put forward that China should establish<br />

an integrated information service system for MFWs.<br />

Websites are indispensable parts of an integrated information<br />

service system for MFWs. With the implication of “Village<br />

Connection” policy, the number of agriculture-related websites<br />

had reached nearly 20,000 by the end of 2010 in China [16].<br />

Current studies on these websites mainly include website<br />

construction [17]; [18], webmetrics [19], roles of websites played<br />

in rural informatization [20], existing problems e.g. duplicated<br />

and outdated information [21], limited functions and unguaranteed<br />

information authenticity [22], and low browse rate and inadequate<br />

brand building [23]. However, only several websites special for<br />

MFWs have emerged in recent few years. Among 20,000<br />

agriculture-related websites, they occupy only a minimal<br />

proportion but have great significance for MFWs. Moreover, we<br />

had not found any researches on the websites for Chinese MFWs<br />

by June 2011. How do these websites operate? What factors<br />

influence their survival and development? What difficulties are<br />

they faced with? In order to answer these questions, a holistic<br />

exploration is necessary and a multi-case study will be adopted to<br />

realize it.<br />

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK<br />

There are a quantity of theories and methods for website study,<br />

such as usability [24], information architecture (IA), technology<br />

acceptance model (TAM) [25 ], webometrics, social network<br />

analysis (SNA), etc. Studies on usability in LIS and IS fields have<br />

increased dramatically in recent years and a variety of measure<br />

scales have been developed. Shackel advanced four dimensions of<br />

usability, effectiveness, learnability, flexibility and attitude [26].<br />

IA is thought as both a kind of art and a kind of technology on<br />

website building [27] and provides a set of technical aids to make<br />

a website more usable. Webometrics studies the quantitative<br />

aspects of the construction and use of information resources,<br />

structures and technologies on the Web drawing on bibliometric<br />

and informetric approaches [ 28 ]. Abovementioned theories<br />

examine websites from technical, managerial or social<br />

perspectives. Our study will focus on disclosing the effects of the<br />

MFW websites and the influences of some internal and external<br />

factors. This is a comprehensive problem related to managerial,<br />

technical and social issues. It is not enough to employ any single<br />

theory to guide a holistic exploration. Therefore, we select<br />

relevant constructs from present theories and combine them into a<br />

new theoretical framework under a managerial-technical<br />

perspective.<br />

Literatures show that some successful studies focus on complex<br />

aspects of a website rather than a single one. Welch and Pandey<br />

[29] compared different measures for the effect of government<br />

websites and found that except technology, political pressure,<br />

centralization, formalization, goal ambiguity, organizational<br />

culture, communication effect, red tape, complexity and size are<br />

all possible determinants of website effects. To avoid the<br />

shortcomings of a single perspective, Eschenfelder and Miller [30]<br />

established a socio-technical toolkit to measure the openness and<br />

accessibility of government information. Lee and Kozer [31]<br />

96<br />

constructed a model consisting of four major website quality<br />

factors, information quality, service quality, systems quality, and<br />

vendor-specific quality, to measure the effect of e-business<br />

website quality. These studies combined online characteristics of<br />

websites with offline factors and obtained satisfying results. In<br />

terms of this study, research problems could be given a more<br />

detailed examination under a holistic theoretical framework than<br />

under a single theoretical perspective. Out of this consideration, 5<br />

qualitative and quantitative constructs and 7 theoretical<br />

hypotheses are put forward as follows:<br />

2.1 Website Effect<br />

The main goal of the studied websites is to deliver information to<br />

MFWs. An effective website will attract more potential users to<br />

click and satisfy actual users’ information needs better. In this<br />

paper, website effect is taken as the dependent variable. Many<br />

constructs could be extracted to describe or measure website<br />

effect in usability researches. Nilsen [32] used ten usability<br />

heuristics related with user’s satisfaction for user interface design.<br />

Preece [33] adopted the user’s attitude as one of the factors in<br />

defining website usability. Success of information delivery to<br />

intended users or not determines a website’s final effect. Thus<br />

website effect could be defined with two variables, awareness and<br />

users’ satisfaction. High awareness means that a large number of<br />

people have known or experienced the website. In search engine<br />

optimization (SEO) average daily IP clicks and page view (PV)<br />

within a month are used to estimate website awareness. Many<br />

methods are used to evaluate overall user’s satisfaction towards a<br />

website in literatures. In this study, we choose both qualitative and<br />

quantitative indicators to evaluate user’s satisfaction. The former<br />

is used to indicate users’ satisfaction degree by qualitative content<br />

analyses on users’ feedback messages and media comments. The<br />

latter include two quantitative indicators, Google Page Rank<br />

Value (a numeric value that represents how important a page is on<br />

the web) and an overall assessment scored with 5-point Likert<br />

scale by researchers after in-depth investigations of each website<br />

and interviews with its webmaster. These indicators for the<br />

concept of website effect are shown in table 1.<br />

Table 1: Indicators for the concept of website effect<br />

Conceptual<br />

indicator<br />

website<br />

awareness<br />

User<br />

satisfaction<br />

Operational indicator Data Source<br />

Average daily IP clicks,<br />

Page view estimates<br />

within one month<br />

Degree of MFWs’<br />

satisfaction<br />

Websites of ALEXA,<br />

SEO and GOOGLE<br />

Users’ feedback<br />

messages on websites<br />

and comments from<br />

other mass media<br />

Overall assessment Google Page Rank<br />

Value, overall website<br />

analyses and interviews<br />

with webmasters<br />

2.2 Business Model of the Websites<br />

Business model is a concept frequently used in e-business, IS,<br />

computer science, strategy or management [34]. “At its heart, a<br />

business model performs two important functions: value creation<br />

and value capture” [35]. A conceptual business model should

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