Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate similarities and differences in the quality of data representations produced by end-users using the relational model (RM), the extended entity-relationship model (EERM), and the object-oriented model (OOM). By performing laboratory experiments using MIS major students, quality was evaluated on five constructs of a data model (i.e. entity/object, descriptor, identifier, relationship and generalization hierarchy) and six facets of a relationship (i.e. unary one-to-one, unary one-to-many, binary one-to-one, binary one-to-many, binary many-to-many and ternary many-to-many-to-many).The research focused on two major issues: data model design and data model conversion. The first issue investigated the differences in user performance between the RM, the EERM and the OOM. The second investigated the differences in user performance between the RM and the relational conversions of the EERM and the OOM models. For the first issue, EERM and OOM scored much higher than the RM in correctness scores of binary one-to-many and binary many-to-many relationships, but only the EERM led to significance. The RM and OOM scored much higher than EERM for unary one-to-one relationships, however, only the RM resulted in significance. The OOM required significantly less time for task completion than EERM. For the second issue, RM and the relational conversion of OOM scored significantly higher than the relational conversion of EERM for unary one-to-one relationships.
Highlights
End-user computing (EUC) has undergone explosive growth and received a great deal of attention among the MIS research community in recent years (e.g. Rockart & Flannery, 1983; Etezadi-Amoli & Farhoodmand, 1996; Speier & Brown, 1997; Nelson & Todd, 1999)
Jenkins (1982) factored the information system environment into four major elements: information system, human decision-maker, task and performance. Based on his conceptual model of the user-system interface, this study identifies four categories of variables which are vital to understanding database design and use*database management system (DBMS)/data model, human, task and performance
An example (H1) of these hypotheses is worded as: there will be no significant difference in overall user performance between relational model (RM), extended entityrelationship model (EERM) and object-oriented model (OOM) in the modeling of entities/objects
Summary
End-user computing (EUC) has undergone explosive growth and received a great deal of attention among the MIS research community in recent years (e.g. Rockart & Flannery, 1983; Etezadi-Amoli & Farhoodmand, 1996; Speier & Brown, 1997; Nelson & Todd, 1999). End users are mostly involved in environments in which database management systems (DBMSs) and fourth generation languages with DBMS capabilities are used as major tools for application development. The major effort of human factor research in database management systems has focused on issues related to query interfaces The two widely known classes of data models which have been used or proposed for DBMS development are logical/implementation models and conceptual/semantic models. Entity-relationship model (Chen, 1976), semantic data model (Hammer & McLeod, 1981) and object-oriented model The relational model (RM), the entity-relationship model (ERM) and the object-oriented model (OOM) are included in this study. The semantic data model is not included as many of its concepts have been incorporated in the object-oriented model
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