User perceptions of information quality in world wide web information retrieval behaviour

In less than a generation, the World Wide Web has grown from a relatively small cyber play-ground of academic “geeks” into an 11.5 billion-page collection of heterogeneous, inter-connected, network of information and collective knowledge. As an information environment, the World Wide Web is informatically representative of all that is good and bad about the human need to both absorb and transmit knowledge. The ‘open’ nature of the Web makes instantly available, to anyone who can “log-on”, a boundless digital library of information, the quality of which cannot be enforced before, during, or even after its publication. Scrutiny of Information Quality (IQ), is therefore left up to those publishers conscientious enough to care about the quality of the information they produce, and the users who choose to employ the Web as an information retrieval tool. The following thesis is a qualitative investigation of how the users of information make value-judgments about the information they encounter and retrieve from the Web. Specifically, it examines perceptions of IQ from the perspective of eighty “academic” high-end users, who regularly engage the Web and its search engines to search for and retrieve high-quality information related to their research, teaching and learning. The investigation has adopted an inductive approach in the qualitative analysis of quantitative (10,080 separate pieces of user-data) data in the context of such established frameworks as Davis’ (1986, 1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and Wang & Strong’s (1996) contextual IQ framework that conceptualised dimensions of quality into four IQ categories, namely: intrinsic; representational; contextual; and accessibility IQ. Through the detailed analysis of the driving theory behind these, and other associated models of: (1) user IT acceptance; (2) Information Seeking Behaviour (ISB); and (3) multi-dimensional characteristics of IQ; the researcher has sought to find synergies and develop an innovative framework by which to explore the impact of users’ attitudes, expectations and perceptions of IQ on their Web information retrieval behaviours.