Quick assessment of web content perceptions

These datasets contain raw data collected in a series of three studies. Aim was to create a short version of the Web-CLIC questionnaire (Thielsch & Hirschfeld, 2019, see https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2017.1421954). The Web-CLIC can be used to assess subjective perceptions of website content with the sub-facets clarity, likeability, informativeness, and credibility.

In digital media and on the World Wide Web, content is king. As such, users’ subjective perceptions of content can influence a variety of their evaluations, thereby altering their attitudes and behavioral outcomes. Thus, users’ content perceptions need to be assessed using a valid measure, but this often has to be done while keeping the survey time as short as possible. For these situations, we created a four-item short version of the Web-CLIC questionnaire (Thielsch & Hirschfeld, 2019). We tested this version, called the Web-CLIC-S, in a series of three studies, including n = 1,414 participants and evaluating, in sum, 33 fully functional websites of different content domains. The Web-CLIC-S reflects the g-factor of subjective web content experience: Unidimensionality was tested with confirmatory factor analysis, and the very high correlations between the shortened and the full version (.949 ≤ r ≤ .972) indicate that the Web-CLIC-S can serve as a proxy for the Web-CLIC overall score. The Web-CLIC-S also demonstrates high internal consistencies and high short- to medium-term retest reliabilities. Furthermore, we find strong evidence for construct validity in terms of convergent, divergent, discriminative, concurrent, incremental, and predictive validity. Overall, the present research suggests that the Web-CLIC-S can serve as a sound screening tool to assess users’ subjective perception of content in research and practice settings.

The studies were approved by the ethics committee of the Department 7 of the University of Münster (ID 2018-13-MT). The authors are grateful for the award of a grant supporting Study 3: This research is supported by the Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Health.

In addition to the raw data, a codebook is provided for each study for better comprehensibility. The raw data only contain information from persons who have been included in the analysis and who have agreed to it. Some demographic information has been deleted to ensure anonymity. Data of Study 1 include three measuring points to estimate the short-term (two days) and the medium-term (two weeks) stability of the Web-CLIC-S.
Finally, the full list of website URLs collected in the pre-study to Study 1 is enclosed as well as the final Web-CLIC-S items.