Women vs. Men: Perceptions of Data Quality in Web Portals

The need to compete for user preference has arisen on the Internet. One competition-based strategy is to provide an adequate quality of service, and one of the key factors in this is the quality of the data provided. Web portals have been consolidated as an appropriate means to organize and facilitate access to data on the Internet. Many organizations and businesses also use them to provide either an alternative to the traditional manner of doing business, or complimentary services. It is thus interesting for Web portals developers to know how users value Data Quality. In this paper we show the results of a study that inquires into users´ opinions of the Intrinsic Data Quality in Web portals in order to discover whether there are any differences in data quality preferences depending on the user´s gender. This has been done by defining the hypothesis that men and women place different importance on quality characteristics. However, as a result we have discovered that, in general, they have the same opinion of the majority of the quality characteristics. In fact, we only found differences in the Objectivity and Understandability characteristics.