An Empirical Study of Consumer Satisfaction with Online Health Information Retrieval

This research examines the area of Online Consumer Health Information Retrieval (HIR) as: “a field of study that pertains to consumers’ use of the Internet to locate and evaluate health related information, for the purposes of self education and collection of facts to enable informed decision making.” A research model exploring the antecedents of consumer satisfaction with online HIR is developed by using the constructs quality, trust beliefs and satisfaction. This model for consumer satisfaction with online HIR is quantitatively validated using structural equation modeling techniques. The findings of this research provide evidence that content quality, technical adequacy and trust beliefs explain a large proportion of the variance in satisfaction with online HIR for consumers.