Relationships among different subjective measurements of consumer health information retrieval performance.
BACKGROUND
Millions of consumers perform health information retrieval (HIR) online. To better understand the consumers' perspective on HIR performance, we conducted an observation and interview study of 97 health information consumers.


METHODS
Consumers were asked to perform HIR tasks and we recorded their view regarding performance using several differ-ent subjective measurements: finding the desired information, usefulness of the information found, satisfaction with the information, and intention to continue searching. Statistical analysis was applied to verify if the multiple subjective measurements were redundant.


RESULTS
The measurements ranged from slight agreement to no agreement among them. A number of reasons were identified for this lack of agreement.


CONCLUSIONS
Although related, the four subjective measurements of HIR performance are distinct from each other and carried different useful information
Zeng
Qing T
QT
Decision Systems Group Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA. qzeng@yahoo.com
Kogan
Sandra
S
Ngo
Long
L
Greenes
Robert A
RA
D003258:Consumer Behavior; D006262:Health; D006266:Health Education; D006296:Health Services; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet