Multiple Measures of Website Effectiveness and their Association with Service Quality in Health and Human Service Agencies

Although many different measures of Web site effectiveness have been developed, few studies have rigorously compared and contrasted the measures. Based on the organizational effectiveness literature, this paper first develops a framework for categorizing different e-government measures and compares three different quantitative measures of effectiveness of Web sites in state health and human services agencies - one used by researchers and two attributable to managers. The paper then develops a model to analyze (1) the organizational and environmental factors that determine Web site effectiveness and (2) how Web site effectiveness contributes to overall service quality of the agency. Low correlations among the three Web site measures indicate that effectiveness is a multidimensional concept: effectiveness depends upon the referent and the analyst´s perspective. Similarly, model results show that different effectiveness measures are determined by categorically different sets of independent variables. Moreover, results show that in some cases Web site effectiveness is negatively associated with service quality