Posts Tagged ‘credibility ’
The buzz around Q&A startup Quora has been building steadily over the past couple of months. I measure this not only by the number of Follow messages received concerning people randomly sampled from my Facebook connections which are now flooding my inbox, but also by the heated debate that is developing about the site’s usefulness, much of which is chronicled in this TechCrunch article about the “Quora Backlash Backlash”.
I’m embedding a presentation I gave at a recent “Data Lunch” about how to analyze responses to Likert items. As I am not a stats expert in any respect, I learned a number of things while putting this together – one of the most important is that Likert isn’t actually pronounced “Like-ert”, it’s pronounced “Lick-ert”, which is still tough for me to remember to say. Anyways, hope you enjoy, I’ll include some summary below as well.
Last month, I read a study by B. J. Fogg and others from the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, entitled “What Makes Web Sites Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study”. The paper described an early effort to systematically determine how different elements of web sites affect people’s perceptions of credibility (defined roughly as the intersection of trustworthiness and expertise). The original study design had 1400 participants completing a survey which presented them with 51 web site elements and asked them to rate how much more or less each element would affect the believability of a web site. The two questions I hope to answer, roughly, are “What has changed in the past 10 years about how people assess web site credibility?” and “Is there a cheaper, yet effective, way to do a study like this?”. The results have implications for website design.
