Personal Influence on Citizens' Utilization of Government Information: An Empirical Study

The purpose of this paper is to understand the public demand for government information in China and to find out if citizens’ individual characteristics, such as gender, age, education, income, residence and occupation influence their utilization behavior of government information. A survey is conducted to collect data, and total and partial correlation methods are adopted to analyze the data. Results show that “government news” and “policies and regulations” are the two kinds of mostly needed GI. TV, newspaper and Internet are three kinds of mostly used ways to accept GI. It is also interesting to find that education, residence and occupation, especially occupation, have significant correlation with citizens’ recognition of government information. This finding implies that it is helpful to pay more attention to other social, economic and cultural factors in explaining the recognition and utilization of GI and e-government services except for demographic ones.