A framework for developing better instruments to measure web based health information quality

With the Internet becoming a growing source of health information, evaluating the quality of the webbased health information is essential. A number of consumer-oriented instruments were designed to assess the quality of health information. However, existent tools are incomprehensive, unvalidated, not easy to use, and difficult to understand. The main objective of this study is to provide a framework for systematically developing validated and usable instruments to evaluate the quality of web-based health information. The framework incorporates item-to-total correlation and factor analysis. Next, weighting scores for the quality criteria are assigned based on the application of the Kano model to classify quality criteria as basic, performance or attractive. The development process ends with testing the instrument in terms of its usability, readability, reliability and validity. Among the implications and contributions of this research is improving the quality of the evaluation instruments and making the process of developing assessment tools more standardized and transparent.

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