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The QUEST for quality online health information: validation of a short quantitative tool Robillard, Julie M.; Jun, Jessica H.; Lai, Jen-Ai; Feng, Tanya L.

Abstract

Background: Online health information is unregulated and can be of highly variable quality. There is currently no singular quantitative tool that has undergone a validation process, can be used for a broad range of health information, and strikes a balance between ease of use, concision and comprehensiveness. To address this gap, we developed the QUality Evaluation Scoring Tool (QUEST). Here we report on the analysis of the reliability and validity of the QUEST in assessing the quality of online health information. Methods: The QUEST and three existing tools designed to measure the quality of online health information were applied to two randomized samples of articles containing information about the treatment (n = 16) and prevention (n = 29) of Alzheimer disease as a sample health condition. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using a weighted Cohen’s kappa (κ) for each item of the QUEST. To compare the quality scores generated by each pair of tools, convergent validity was measured using Kendall’s tau (τ) ranked correlation. Results: The QUEST demonstrated high levels of inter-rater reliability for the seven quality items included in the tool (κ ranging from 0.7387 to 1.0, P 

Item Metadata

Title
The QUEST for quality online health information: validation of a short quantitative tool
Creator
Robillard, Julie M.; Jun, Jessica H.; Lai, Jen-Ai; Feng, Tanya L.
Contributor
Children's Hospital (Vancouver, B.C.); Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health
Publisher
BioMed Central
Date Issued
2018-10-19
Description
Background: Online health information is unregulated and can be of highly variable quality. There is currently no singular quantitative tool that has undergone a validation process, can be used for a broad range of health information, and strikes a balance between ease of use, concision and comprehensiveness. To address this gap, we developed the QUality Evaluation Scoring Tool (QUEST). Here we report on the analysis of the reliability and validity of the QUEST in assessing the quality of online health information. Methods: The QUEST and three existing tools designed to measure the quality of online health information were applied to two randomized samples of articles containing information about the treatment (n = 16) and prevention (n = 29) of Alzheimer disease as a sample health condition. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using a weighted Cohen’s kappa (κ) for each item of the QUEST. To compare the quality scores generated by each pair of tools, convergent validity was measured using Kendall’s tau (τ) ranked correlation. Results: The QUEST demonstrated high levels of inter-rater reliability for the seven quality items included in the tool (κ ranging from 0.7387 to 1.0, P 
Subject
Online health information; Quality evaluation; eHealth; Instrument validation
Genre
Article
Type
Text
Language
eng
Date Available
2018-10-25
Provider
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
DOI
10.14288/1.0373086
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/67686
Affiliation
Medicine, Faculty of; Other UBC; Medicine, Department of
Citation
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 2018 Oct 19;18(1):87
Publisher DOI
10.1186/s12911-018-0668-9
Peer Review Status
Reviewed
Scholarly Level
Faculty
Copyright Holder
The Author(s).
Rights URI
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)