An Empirical Study of Subjective Information Quality

Having quality information is crucial for effective operations and decision making within organisations. There is little agreement, however, about how information quality should be defined and measured. The Semiotic Information Quality framework provides a sound theoretical basis for defining information quality at three levels: syntactic (form), semantic (content), and pragmatic (usage). Objective measures have been defined for the syntactic and semantic levels. In this paper we focus on the pragmatic level by developing and empirically testing an instrument that aims to measure subjective aspects of information quality based on the perceptions of information consumers. The study serves as the basis for refining the framework’s pragmatic level and for further development of an associated measurement instrument for subjective information quality. In combination, such a framework and instrument have the potential to aid organizations in identifying problems and planning improvement strategies for information quality.