E-GOVERNMENT ADOPTION AMONG CITIZENS: THE CASE STUDY OF HEALTH CARE WORKERS IN A RURAL TURKISH HOSPITAL

Abdullah Naralan, Ali Kemal Çelik, Selçuk Bakan

Abstract


Rapid technological development enables governments to provide citizens more effective, timely and cost efficient services. Nowadays, many of the public services can be accomplished by utilizing the Internet. In this sense, Internet use in public services, widely known as e-Government, is adopted as an essential intermediary for government organizations on establishing a national ICT infrastructure. Although Turkey was connected to the Internet in 1993, the number of Internet users in Turkey has reached to nearly 37 million people, ranking the country to be one of the top 20 countries in the world. It may be stated that Turkey is still at the beginning of the information society transformation, at the same time, along with the motivation of e-Europe+ project in 2001; Turkish government organizations increasingly utilize the information and communication technologies in their activities. E-Government opportunities focus on the implementation of digital public services through instant access for citizens. However, the adoption and interaction of e-Government among citizens are nontrivial changes, while both of them require respectable period of time. The purpose of this study is to investigate the e-Government adoption levels of citizens in a rural province of Turkey. The study concentrates on the e-Government adoption among health care workers in Atatürk University Research Hospital. A questionnaire was prepared and applied to 200 representative health care workers. The results of the survey indicated that there were still barriers against the adoption of e-Government among health care workers, although the Internet use in public services was increasing. The regression and ANOVA results also suggested the statistically significant relationship between e-Government adoption and education level, income level, internet connection, and computer use level at the 0.05 and 0.10 significance levels.

Keywords


E-Government adoption, health care workers, regression analysis, ANOVA

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References


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