The effects of information request ambiguity and construct incongruence on query development

This paper examines the effects of information request ambiguity and construct incongruence on end user's ability to develop SQL queries with an interactive relational database query language. In this experiment, ambiguity in information requests adversely affected accuracy and efficiency. Incongruities among the information request, the query syntax, and the data representation adversely affected accuracy, efficiency, and confidence. The results for ambiguity suggest that organizations might elicit better query development if end users were sensitized to the nature of ambiguities that could arise in their business contexts. End users could translate natural language queries into pseudo-SQL that could be examined for precision before the queries were developed. The results for incongruence suggest that better query development might ensue if semantic distances could be reduced by giving users data representations and database views that maximize construct congruence for the kinds of queries in typical domains. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Health services research using linked records: who consents and what is the gain?

Objective: To assess consent to record linkage, describe the characteristics of consenters and compare self-report versus Medicare records of general practitioner use. Method. Almost 40,000 women in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health were sent a request by mail for permission to link their Medicare records and survey data. Results: 19,700 women consented: 37% of young (18-23 years), 59% of mid-age (4550 years) and 53% of older women (70-75 years). Consenters tended to have higher levels of education and, among the older cohort, were in better health than nonconsenters. Women tended to under-report the number of visits to general practitioners. Conclusions: Record linkage of survey and Medicare data on a large scale is feasible. The linked data provide information on health and socio-economic status which are valuable for understanding health service utilisation. Implications: Linked records provide a powerful tool for health care research, particularly in longitudinal studies.

International market selection: Developing a model from Australian case studies

This paper develops a theory that firms seek out new country markets on the basis of expected commercial returns. These expectations depend on judgements about the attractiveness of the market and the firm's competitive position in it, which in turn are influenced by informants. It is the number and strengths of these informants that will underlie the probability of a country being identified and assessed as a new market by any firm.