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While chronically ill patients can significantly benefit from self-management (SM) information systems, they are also unlikely to perceive, use, and benefit from them in the same way, and past research has observed that many patients tend to not use such systems effectively. A key premise of the present study is that attributing the cause of one’s success or failure in self-managing one’s chronic disease to SM information systems is likely to influence how patients react to such systems, which in turn is likely to influence their usage behaviors and SM performance. Building upon attribution theory and learned helplessness theory, this paper examines how patients’ causal attributions of their success or failure in self-managing their chronic illness tends to influence the way they cognitively perceive, emotionally react to, and use an IT-based SM system. It also examines what constituted effective use in the SM context that was studied and how patients’ effective use of an IT-based SM system tended to influence their SM performance. Based on data collected from patients who were using a web-based asthma SM portal, the paper identifies three SM attributional styles and three patient views of SM information systems that help explain how chronically ill patients tend to interact with such systems, as well as the consequences of this interaction, and discusses the implications of the findings for research and practice.

Defining user participation as the activities performed by users during systems development, user involvement as the importance and personal relevance of a system to its user, and user attitude as the affective evaluation of a system by the user, this study aims to: (1) develop separate measures of user participation, user involvement, and user attitude, (2) identify key dimensions of each construct, and (3) investigate the relationships among them. Responses from users in organizations developing new information systems were used to create an overall scale measuring user participation (along with three subscales reflecting the dimensions of responsibility, user-IS relationship, and hands-on activities), an overall scale measuring user involvement (along with two subscales reflecting the dimensions of importance and personal relevance), and a scale measuring user attitude. Analysis of the data provides evidence for the reliability and validity of the three constructs and their dimensions. User participation has long been considered a key variable in the successful development of information systems. However, past research has failed to clearly demonstrate its benefits. The measures developed in this study provide a useful starting point for deciphering the precise nature of the relationship among user participation, involvement, and attitude during systems implementation.

In June 1988 MIS Quarterly published a classification scheme of IS keywords. The development of this scheme was intended to provide a description of the discipline, introduce a common language, and enable research of the field's development. The scheme has been recently updated in order to incorporate the new research topics and methods, hence better reflecting the evolution of the IS discipline.

Within the field of information systems, user involvement generally refers to participation in the systems development process by potential users of their representatives and is measured as a set of behaviors or activities that such individuals perform. This article argues for a separation of the constructs of user participation (a set of behaviors or activities performed by users in the system development process) and user involvement (a subjective psychological state reflecting the importance and personal relevance of a system to the user). Such a distinction is not only more consistent with conceptualizations of involvement found in other disciplines, but it also leads to a number of new and interesting hypotheses. These hypotheses promise a richer theoretical network that describes the role and importance of participation and involvement in the implementation process.

Information systems researchers, while helping others build better information systems, have done little in supporting their own information needs. The large amount of knowledge accumulated in IS today has created a situation where the researcher needs some sort of organizing mechanism to map the IS territory and relate its different components. A keyword classification scheme performs such a task through its content descriptors, systematically listed to show their relationships. This paper proposes a keyword classification scheme for IS. The scheme contains over 1,100 keywords and consists of nine top-level categories (reference disciplines, external environment, technological environment, organizational environment, IS management, IS development and operations, IS usage, information systems, and IS education and research), each of which is divided into subcategories.