It Makes Me Feel Incompetent and Anxious: An Exploratory Study of How Techno-Stressors Affect Older Adult Satisfaction Toward E-Government Service

Despite growing emphasize on the vital role of e-government in mitigating digital inequality, research on factors refraining the seniors from obtaining satisfied experience in the use of e-government service has been largely absent. This may limit our understanding about how e-government service could be utilized to close the grey digital divide. This study explored the extent to which techno-stressors from e-government service affected seniors’ satisfaction and uncovered the underlying psychological mechanisms by tapping into the cognitive and emotional processes. Based on survey data of 302 Chinese senior adults who had the experience of using e-government service, the results revealed that both techno-complexity and techno-risk were techno-stressors negatively associated with the seniors’ satisfaction toward e-government service. Moreover, techno-self-efficacy and techno-anxiety were demonstrated to link techno-stressors to e-government satisfaction in a slightly different manner. While techno-risk was associated with e-government satisfaction via only techno-self-efficacy, techno-complexity was channeled to e-government satisfaction via both techno-anxiety and techno-self-efficacy. The findings underscore the importance of eliminating techno-stressors for better inclusion of seniors and offer a dynamic view for the intervention of techno-self-efficacy and techno-anxiety by considering them as malleable psychological processes rather than inherent features of senior people preceding their use of e-government service.