Perceived credibility: an elusive concept May 14, 2007

Measuring Online Trust of Websites: Credibility, Perceived Ease of Use, and Risk

This particular paper is about the development of a survey tool for measuring online trust. Social scientists have long had good data about offline trust, but have not until recently had a body of information about online trust. Obviously, many commercial websites would love to know exactly what they can do to better project authority, credibility, and sincerity to consumers.

The paper describes how the tool was tested using two well-known websites and gives the statistical data that shows the tool is valid. The authors used confirmatory factor analysis, a statistical method that helps develop the full and accurate set of attributes describing the data. The goal was to pare down the instrument so that the questions comprising it do not overlap, but still completely describe this model of online trust.

It’s interesting that scientists have taken this long to quantify information that is so useful—and therefore so financially valuable—to e-commerce.

Credibility Assessments of Online Health Information: The Effects of Source Expertise and Knowledge of Content

It’s not too startling to learn that it’s not medical professionals who author most of the medical information on the Internet (what, are you kidding?). This is an important reason to educate online health site users in assessing the credibility of these sites. This article, like the previous one, is about the development of an assessment tool with independent factors that hopefully will completely describe online credibility without redundancy.

The news that 55 percent of Internet users are specifically seeking medical information online is rather startling. As the article points out, there’s no FCC to keep people from posting egregious misinformation on their websites, so the more gullible of the medical information seekers may be dangerously vulnerable. I know one of the doctors in the clinic I used to go to would actually get a bit testy whenever a patient would mention having looked up a symptom/disease/treatment online, unless they specifically said “I looked this up on the CDC website” (or UWMC, Harvard Medical School, NIH, Mayo Clinic–insert venerable medical institution of your choice here). I always thought she was being a little ridiculous, but that’s because I wouldn’t think of doing a Google search for “ovarian cancer” and looking at every Arial-font, Flash-advertisements site that pops up. Quite honestly, I have a hard time believing that anyone else does either; I think most of us have a strong innate perception of what is credible.

Which brings us to what may be the hidden point of this research: some information that meets many of our innate credibility tests (professional site design, reasonable privacy policy, source citations, etc.) may be problematic—and it wouldn’t have to be completely bogus in order to misinform users, particularly where medical information is concerned . I think I’ll keep that more firmly in mind, and not just on medical sites.

Discussion question:  what exactly is “dynamism,” and why does it affect perceived credibility? (And why does the word itself make me think of a county-fair huckster in this context?) (Eastin 2001)