Page 62 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

ICT acceptance behavior of rural digital poverty

communities: Field reports from China’s six provinces
and municipalities ①a

1 *
YAN Hui ①b & LIU Jiqun 2
1 School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
2 School of Communication and Information, the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers

Abstract
Digital poverty, one significant profile of digital inequality, refers to the poor situations in which residents
are difficult to approach, accept and use continuously information and communication technologies. Based
on importing of the theories of technology acceptance behavior and IT continuance in digital poverty, the
paper proposes two research questions: 1) How do digital poor communities in rural areas get access to
and accept ICTs? How do they expect their future usage of ICTs? 2) What factors are typically pushing
the rural residents towards acceptance of ICTs? The authors conducted field studies in seventeen rural
communities in four provinces (Gansu, Anhui, Hunan, and Guizhou) and two municipalities (Tianjin and
Chongqing) in fifty-six days between 2011 and 2013.We established the three stages of ICT acceptance
behavior of the rural digitally poor which includes ICT access, ICT use, and ICT expectance, and further
structured a three-layered transmission model, from objective contexts, subjective perception to actual ICT
acceptance behavior. The objective contexts consist of individual’s personal attributes and external social
environment. The subjective perception consists of the perception of ICT usability, the perceived ease of
use, self-efficacy, negative perception of ICT, perceived ICT usage, and perception of information needs.

Keywords
Digital poverty community, ICT acceptance behavior, Digital inequality, Technology acceptance model,
Rural community, Community informatics

With the background of rapid development of information society, digital poverty as a new
measuring variable makes the gaps between the rich and the poor among urban and rural residents
more dimensional and complicated. It becomes more difficult for the poor people to move up
towards the rich classes. Digital poverty represents itself in a more complex way: difficulties
in access to digital devices and disability of paying the digital cost on physical level; shortage
of related digital knowledge and skills, and digital consciousness, and moreover negative
psychological factors of self-attribution on cognitive level. At least, the complexity of digital
poverty exceeds the poor situations in economic, cultural and social resources.

①a Special contribution for the Youth Academic Forum sponsored by this Journal.
This article is an outcome of the yout project“An Empirical Study on Rural Residents’ Digital Poverty in China：Phenomena，
Attributions and Strategies”(No.11CTQ009) supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to YAN Hui，Email：hyanpku@ruc.edu.cn，ORCID：0000-0002-3649-1601