E-gov outpaces e-commerce in new survey

More than one-half of surveyed adults with access to the Internet visited federal, state or local government Web sites in 2001, according to a report released Wednesday. One-third of those surveyed had visited federal Web sites. Conducted by the Center for e-Service at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and Rockbridge Associates Inc., a Great Falls, Va., market research firm, the 2001 National Technology Readiness Survey gauged the responses of 500 adults with access to the Internet last November. The survey's margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points. Twenty-one percent of adults online not only visited, but conducted some type of transaction with local, state or federal governments, slightly higher than the percentage of adults who conducted transactions with private businesses online. "E-government is much larger than most people realize," said Roland Rust, director of the Center for e-Service. In fact, the data show adults are more comfortable making government transactions online than trading stocks or paying their credit card bills online. "This indicates that although e-government may have started slower than e-commerce it is catching up fast and in many cases may be outpacing e-commerce," he said. Nearly three-quarters of adults with four or more years of college had visited government Web sites, with 55 percent having visited federal Web sites specifically. Eighteen percent have conducted business online with the federal government. At the same time, only 41 percent of online adults with no college education had visited some government Web site and only 2 percent had conducted business online with a federal Web site. "This [difference] is very striking," Rust said. "The very educated are big e-government users and the uneducated basically don't use it." Because the study looked at adults who were already online, the education effect transcends the so-called digital divide, Rust said. "This means there are people online who aren't taking full advantage of e-services," he said The survey also revealed that adults between ages 35 and 54 are the most likely to have visited a government Web site, with 56 percent doing so in 2001. In this age group, 14 percent had conducted business online with the federal government. Suburban surfers are most likely to have visited government Web sites. Forty-one percent of suburbanites visited federal Web sites, followed by 21 percent of rural citizens and 18 percent of urban or inner city residents.