Relationships among different subjective measurements of consumer health information retrieval performance

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.

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.

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

Although related, the four subjective measurements of HIR performance are distinct from each other and carried different useful information