Page 66 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

YAN Hui & LIU Jiqun / ICT acceptance behavior of rural digital poverty communities: 065
Field reports from China’s six provinces and municipalities

In the current empirical research on digital inequality and digitally poor communities, selection
of research objects and data collection is always finished from some field site in a limited scope.
In comparison with large scale questionnaire, such qualitative research is good at discovering
micro behavior and cognitive structure. However, it lacks heterogeneous field samples and forms
limitations on explanatory power and applying realm. To maintain research depth and theory
innovation, decrease losses of span and practical degree, and promote representative and coverage
of research finding, we selected twelve villages from Gansu, Tianjin, Anhui, Hunan, Guizhou and
Chongqing. Those field sites are distributed among different areas of China, including east, middle
and west areas, representing diverse social economic developing rates and culture traditions, and
could provide persuasive evidence on nationwide digitally poor communities and rural digital
practices. By exploring digitally poor communities and their interacting relations with contexts, we
focus on widely-distributed digital poverty phenomena in most areas of China, and develop more
robust and wider adaptive theory of ICT acceptance behavior in digital poverty context.
The contexts and general information about the twelve field sites have been referred in detail in
the published articles(H. Yan & Hong, 2014; Liu, H. Yan, & Y. R.Wang, 2013; M. Wang & H. Yan,
2013; Liu & H. Yan, 2015 ), so we skip them in this paper. Field study method was employed in
data collecting and lasted for more than two years, from August 2011 to August of 2013. We spent
fifty-six days in the fields of seventeen villages, covering 211 in-depth interviews and 9 focus
groups. Time interval of in-depth interview is 25 to 45 minutes, while focus group always takes 50
to 70 minutes. We collected 227 complementary questionnaires, focusing on their basic cognitions
on our research questions of digital poverty. Finally usable questionnaires are 207, covering 115
male respondents and 92 female. The age of 31.3% is under thirty years old, 41.6% is between
thirty to fifty years old, 27.1% are older than fifty. 17.2% of the respondents owned educational
degree of no more than elementary school level; 32.6% were primary middle school degrees;
44.5% graduated from high middle school; and only 3.2 % possessed bachelor degree. About the
number neighbors and friends who can surf the Internet, 52.5% of the respondents had more than
ten; 23% had five to ten; and 21.2% knew one to five the related neighbors and friends. There are
remaining 3.2% who had no Internet skilled neighbors and friends.
For data analysis, our research adopted grounded theory method to develop ICT technology
acceptance theory in the context of digital poverty. Based on research questions of ICT access,
usage and expectations of rural residents, we finished three coding stages: open coding, axial
coding and selective coding, to combine with the concepts and constructs from literature like
gender, age, profession and social capital, field coding including computer access, network access
and physical barriers, and rural residents’ self-forming and inductive concepts, for instance, no
time, no extra brain, no usefulness, and perception of too expensive price. Concept categories and
system were gradually developed and richened in the process and reached theoretical saturation
finally by the standard of no emergence of new variables and concept category with extra
sample field textual data. In expression of textual evidence on the built theory, we deleted the