User acceptance of m-government services in Saudi Arabia : an SEM approach

In spite of many benefits normally attributed to the use of e-government and its more recent variety mobile- (m-) government, there are still many obstacles reported facing the adoption of both, especially in developing countries. We explore the situation in one of them, namely Saudi Arabia, aiming to study factors affecting citizens' adoption of m-government. We tailor a new conceptual model for m-government adoption by citizens based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and specifically consider important factors such as perceived service quality, perceived trust, user satisfaction and perceived mobility. We also tailor measuring those factors to account for the specifics of the new mobile aspect in the existing theories and carry out a large scale survey (695 analysed respondents from King Saud University and Immam Muhammed Bin Saud University) followed by quantitative analysis involving structural equation modelling. Our results support most of the anticipated relationships between the factors and adoption, and will help policy makers and developers of e-government systems to increase citizen's adoption

Developing and validating an instrument for measuring mobile government adoption in Saudi Arabia

Many governments recently started to change the ways of providing their services by allowing their citizens to access services from anywhere without the need of visiting the location of the service provider. Mobile government (M-government) is one of the techniques that fulfill that goal. It has been adopted by many governments. M-government can be defined as an implementation of Electronic Government (E-Government) by using mobile technology with the aim of improving service delivery to citizens, businesses and all government agencies. There have been several research projects developing models to understand the behavior of individuals towards the adoption of m-government. This paper proposes a model for adoption of m-government services in Saudi Arabia by extending Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by introducing external factors. This paper also reports on the development of a survey instrument designed to measure user perception of mobile government acceptance. A survey instrument has been developed by using existing scales from prior instruments and a pilot study has been conducted by distributing the survey to 33 participants. As a result, a survey instrument has been refined to retain 43 items. The results also showed that the reliabilities of all the scales in the survey instrument are above the levels acceptable in current academic research, thus the instruments developed by us are capable of analyzing the factors in M-government adoption

Using focus group method to identifying citizen requirements to Saudi mobile government services

Mobile government services implementation faces several challenges in developing countries. This paper studies some of those challenges in the context of Saudi Arabia. The study aims to investigate factors affecting m-government acceptance in Saudi Arabia, including ease of use, usefulness, service quality, trust, intention to use and users' satisfaction. Our investigation will help in integrating the m-government services in citizens' everyday life. We collected and analyzed our data from focus groups. These focus groups are from King Saud University and Imam Muhammed Bin Saud University, so the samples size are five and seven participants, respectively. We found that there are some factors to identifying citizen requirements to Saudi mobile government services. These services should be easy to use and not require too much effort. Also, these services must be fully trusted

Using GPower software to determine the sample size from the pilot study

Recently, the estimation of the sample size is very important topic for the researchers, so it is an indispensable process for obtaining good results. There are two way to determine the sample size which are from literature review and from the pilot study. In this poster, we will focus on power analysis to get suitable sample size for our research. This power analysis is conducted to assess the minimum sample size requirement. GPower software application is used to perform a priori power analysis for the study taking multiple regression analysis for the validation of the measurement model. The required power was set at 1- β = 0.80. Level of significance was kept at α = 0.05. Effect size was kept at small range value of 0.02. For the measurement model each proposed latent construct has four indicators and the number of predictors is taken as 7. Using these settings, power curve was extracted. Figure 1 gives the power curve for different values of power ranging from 0.5 to 0.95. Power analysis clearly indicates that to achieve, power of 0.80, a total sample size of n = 725 is needed for this study. Therefore using the literature and thumb rule method and results of power analysis indicate that the total sample size needed for the study is around n = 750. Therefore, 800 respondents are taken as the optimal sample size for the investigation

Applying mixed research methods to mobile government studies in Saudi Arabia

Many governments started recently to change the way of providing their services, with the aim of providing accelerated services with an access to citizens from anywhere, without the need to go to the physical place of the service provider. Therefore, m-Government was one of the techniques which fulfil that goal. However, the concept of m-Government in Saudi Arabia is still in its early stage. Therefore, the Saudi government should pay more attention towards adoption of m-Government services for its nationals and to achieve its goals. In contrast, there are many researchers who have interested in developing models to understanding the behaviour of individuals towards the adoption of m-government. This paper reviews some models which explain the behaviour of individuals towards the adoption of any new technology in general. It also presents the aim of the research and the proposed methodology which will be used in this research