An integrated approach for service quality evaluation of online health communities based on q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic aggregation operators

Online health communities (OHCs) have emerged as a significant platform for people communicating health information and self-healthcare management. In recent, the researches focusing on its performance measurement and the service quality evaluation have drawn intensive attention. Although some qualitative methods have made evaluation and analyses for the OHCs performance, the studies based on fuzzy multi-attribute decision making theory are rarely developed in the service quality evaluation of OHCs. In view of the complexity and uncertainty of evaluation mission, this paper develops an integrated evaluation approach of the OHC service quality based on the q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic aggregation operators. Firstly, we propose the cross-entropy of q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers, which is applied in solving the optimal weight of indicators by a linear programming model. Next, the q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic power average (q-ROFLPA) and q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic partitioned dual Maclaurin symmetric mean (q-ROFLPDMSM) operators are developed for aggregating the assessment information and ranking the OHCs. Based on the proposed aggregation operators, the evaluation indicator system and an evaluation framework are constructed to accomplish the service quality evaluation of OHCs. Finally, a practical evaluation case of OHCs is provided to demonstrate the reliability and advantages of the proposed approach.