Exploring the Items for Measuring the Consumers’ Behavior in Online Health Information-Seeking via E-Health Websites Constructs: An Exploratory Factor Analysis (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Advance technological breakthroughs have dramatically contributed to the nature of the healthcare environment paired with current concerns arise over patients’ health information seeking and how to seek them effectively; the e-health systems are gaining the attention of more and more people. OBJECTIVE The primary objective of this study was to conduct exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to validate questionnaire instruments for measuring the consumers’ behavior in online health information-seeking via e-health websites. METHODS The questionnaire was refined and modified from sixteen different studies. Survey questionnaires were randomly distributed to consumers at public places (such as hospitals and universities) in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. Over three weeks, 100 participants were recruited. EFA was performed using Principal Component Analysis as a variable reduction technique. RESULTS The results of the analysis showed that all of the twelve constructs consist of only one component or dimension. The value of factor loading for every item in each construct is more than 0.6, which represents that the factor extracts sufficient variance from that item. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was higher than 0.6 for all the constructs, which demonstrate that the sample size is adequate. For all constructs, the P-value from Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity is lower than the significance level (<.05), which indicates that the dataset is suitable for a data reduction technique. For the entire constructs’ items, Cronbach’s Alpha value was higher than 0.7, which demonstrates the reliability of all items. CONCLUSIONS This study has established in developing a valid and reliable instrument for measuring online consumers’ health information-seeking behavior via e-health websites.