Understanding reactions to an internet-delivered health-care intervention: accommodating user preferences for information provision

摘要

BackgroundIt is recognised as good practice to use qualitative methods to elicit users' views of internet-delivered health-care interventions during their development. This paper seeks to illustrate the advantages of combining usability testing with 'theoretical modelling', i.e. analyses that relate the findings of qualitative studies during intervention development to social science theory, in order to gain deeper insights into the reasons and context for how people respond to the intervention. This paper illustrates how usability testing may be enriched by theoretical modelling by means of two qualitative studies of users' views of the delivery of information in an internet-delivered intervention to help users decide whether they needed to seek medical care for their cold or flu symptoms.