Consumer perceptions of medical information sources: an application of multidimensional scaling

Multidimensional scaling is widely used in marketing research to characterize the perceived relationships among a set of consumer products. The technique is also well suited to study a number of issues that are of interest to health care marketers. This paper explains multidimensional scaling and provides an illustrative example of a health care application. In the research study reported here, the perceptions of various sources of medical information give important insights to a health care organization that is designing a new medical information service for consumers. Other potential applications of the technique for health care marketing are also explored.