Study On Motivations For Government Institution Website Links

As the extention of Informetrics on the web,webometrics has developed into an important branch of web science rapidly. The analysis of website links,which are the significant element on the web,is a research direction given much concern in the field of webometrics. In the early time,link analysis mainly focused on scholarly web environment,many researchers used theories and methods from citation analysis in the study of scholarly web links. But with the Internet gradually becoming diversified and complicated,on the one hand,researchers find that links in scholarly web environment has difference with citations and form its own theories and methods;on the other hand,scholars has started paying attention to link features and link motivations in other web field,with expectations to measure and evaluate web resources reasonably.Figuring out link motivations in web environment is conducive to deeper understanding the topology and distribution of web resources and helpful for mining and evaluation web resources, so as to promote the development of Informetrics.On the basis of the previous study on link motivations all over the world,the paper selects government institution websites,which is rarely studied, as the object of study,acquired organization website link motivations through open interview,combines ethnographic decision tree modeling and grounded theory to design the open interview questionnaire and constructs the ethnographic decision tree model of link behaviors.In the phase of data analysis,the paper applies grounded theory and content analysis to extract 38 link motivations factors,and groups them into 8 categories:supportive links,functional links,publicized links,content links,experienced links,promotional links,mixed links and others.In the phase of validity checking,quantitative structured questionnaire is used to test the validity of ethnographic decision tree model,"formal member checking" and "between-method triangulation"are used to test internal and external validity.By analyzing data, this paper makes conclusions as following:① Owing to the different decision criteria,this paper divides the link behaviors into two groups:website developer/maintainer and website content producer,establishes the individual ethnographic decision models respectively and finally put individual ethnographic decision models together into one composite decision model.19 decision criteria and 2 schemes are obtained.The predictive rate of the model is 91.67% to the homogeneous group after testing.② Motivations for government institution website links are concluded into 8 categories:supportive links,functional links,publicized links,content links experienced links,promotional links,mixed links and others.More than half of them(51.08%)are contributed to supportive and functional links,content and publicized links occupy 30.94%.③ The main function of government institution organization website links are:from the macroscopic perspective,building website space architecture, information navigation, combing and arranging website information and function,page layout, etc.;from the microscopic perspective,information title index(similar to the bibliography), simplifying the website information so as to make it convenient for website users to find out information quickly.④ From link perspective, the main functions of the government institution website are:publicity,interactive channels,information service platform and providing convenience for work.In theory,the paper introduces ethnographic decision tree modeling,which is widely used in agricultural production decision problems and medical anthropology,into the study on government institution website link motivations,and combines grounded theory to supplement.Besides,the paper extracts link motivation factors and concludes them into 8 categories,builds link motivations system structure from button to top by grounded theory.In practice,the paper provides practical implications for government institution websites to establish links and reference for them on website information architecture,website navigation and interactive design.To be honest, the paper still has some shortcomings to be improved because of the restrictions of research conditions and research capability,such as the scale of the sample in the validity checking phase.This paper is one of the achievements of the National Natural Science Foundation project "Theory integration framework and empirical research of link analysis in the perspective of blended paradigm" (Grand No.71273125).