Introduction

Research studies involving the use of the World Wide Web are becoming increasingly common in disciplines such as MIS, marketing, and e-commerce. The focus of these studies is quite varied and may involve issues of human factors (e.g., how does download time impact Web use?), issues of information processing (e.g., what search strategies are employed in various situations?), issues of information content (e.g., how much detail should be provided in the initial product description in an e-commerce application?), or a myriad of other questions. Regardless of the issue being studied, data collection for online Web research often proves to be a vexing problem, and ideal research designs are frequently sacrificed in the interest of finding a reasonable data collection mechanism. Similarly, the administration of experimental treatments under precisely controlled conditions is hardly a trivial exercise when the Web is involved. The researcher is often forced to sacrifice external validity in an attempt to obtain a reasonable degree of internal validity in these experiments.

This chapter describes a general software-based approach to conducting online Web research through the development of a custom research tool. The purpose of this discussion is not to describe a specific research design, or to detail a particular research methodology. Rather, the motivation is to introduce this rather atypical approach to the research area, and to discuss some of the salient issues, techniques, and problems that are involved. Much of the material contained herein was developed as the author struggled with this very topic. It is hoped the reader will be provided with some valuable insights into what to expect from the custom research tool, and how to proceed with its development.



Computing Information Technology. The Human Side
Computing Information Technology: The Human Side
ISBN: 1931777527
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 186

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