title: Relationships among different subjective measurements of consumer health information retrieval performance.
abstract: 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
authors.affiliation: Decision Systems Group Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA. qzeng@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Qing T
authors.initials: QT
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kogan
authors.forename: Long
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ngo
authors.forename: Robert A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Greenes
mesh_terms: D003258:Consumer Behavior; D006262:Health; D006266:Health Education; D006296:Health Services; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet