4,181 research outputs found

    Users' trust in information resources in the Web environment: a status report

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    This study has three aims; to provide an overview of the ways in which trust is either assessed or asserted in relation to the use and provision of resources in the Web environment for research and learning; to assess what solutions might be worth further investigation and whether establishing ways to assert trust in academic information resources could assist the development of information literacy; to help increase understanding of how perceptions of trust influence the behaviour of information users

    A Mixed-Method Examination of Primary Care Physician Message Strategies to Correct Patient-Held Health Misinformation: An Application of Goals-Plans-Action Theory

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    Given the prevalence of health misinformation (i.e., inaccurate health messaging that lacks scientific evidence), there is a need for successful communication strategies to combat this detrimental health issue (Krishna & Thompson, 2021). Guided by goals-plans-action theory (Dillard, 1990), which explains the communicative process of creating and implementing influence messages, the purpose of this dissertation was to: (a) uncover primary care physician goals, plans, and action when correcting patient-held health misinformation and (b) experimentally test corrective influence messages for their effectiveness from the patient’s perspective. Two studies addressed these two purposes. In Study One, results of surveys of primary care physicians (N = 105) discovered significant, positive relationships between their primary goal (i.e., correction of health misinformation) and the secondary goals of identity and conversation management. Additionally, Study One results revealed five types of primary care physician strategic message plans during these conversations (i.e., vocalics, clarity, body positioning, listening behavior, relationship-building tone), and five themes for communicative action strategies that primary care physicians use when correcting patient-held health misinformation (i.e., scientific evidence-based explication, recommendations for evaluating health-related information and sources, emotional and/or relationship-building appeal, simple correction, disregard/judgment). Scenario-based corrective influence messaging was created based on communicative action themes from Study One (i.e., scientific evidence, evaluation recommendation, emotional appeal), checked for validity, and pilot tested. In Study Two, U.S. IX adults ages 18 years and older (N = 371) were asked to imagine they have found information online saying vaccines contain toxic ingredients and decide to bring this information up to their primary care physician, were randomly assigned to read a scenario from one of these three corrective influence messaging themes, and then reported their perceptions of the primary care physician. Results revealed no significant differences between scientific evidence and emotional appeal messages on key patient outcomes including perceived source credibility, patient satisfaction, intent to communicate with and share online health information to a primary care physician. Results of the two studies provide evidence for the applicability of goals-plans-action theory to the context of health misinformation and corrective influence messages, and yield recommendations for primary care physicians to implement when correcting health misinformation

    Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility

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    Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility This chapter argues that understanding credibility is particularly complex -- and consequential -- in the digital media environment, especially for youth audiences, who have both advantages and disadvantages due to their relationship with contemporary technologies and their life experience. The chapter explains what is, and what is not, new about credibility in the context of digital media, and discusses the major thrusts of current credibility concerns for scholars, educators, and youth

    Web Literacy for Evaluating Credibility of Web Information: Issues and Considerations

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    Because of a variety of procedures related to design and presentation of web content and structure, there would be a pressing need to consider issues of quality of web information in upcoming years. It is argued, in the current paper, that evaluation issues related to credibility and quality assessments are of high importance in web environment in comparison with traditional information environments. Some evaluation skills like authority, coverage, currency, objectivity, accuracy, critical thinking and information literacy all of which could be categorized as Web Literacy would be fruitful in doing so. There exists, however, lack of evaluation skills among users caused by their cognitive styles, prior knowledge, information skills and of web resources characteristics as well. Some other solutions like dialectical reading, information ethics and also institutional policymaking will also be taken into account at the end of the paper

    Web Literacy for Evaluating Credibility of Web Information: Issues and Considerations

    Get PDF
    Because of a variety of procedures related to design and presentation of web content and structure, there would be a pressing need to consider issues of quality of web information in upcoming years. It is argued, in the current paper, that evaluation issues related to credibility and quality assessments are of high importance in web environment in comparison with traditional information environments. Some evaluation skills like authority, coverage, currency, objectivity, accuracy, critical thinking and information literacy all of which could be categorized as Web Literacy would be fruitful in doing so. There exists, however, lack of evaluation skills among users caused by their cognitive styles, prior knowledge, information skills and of web resources characteristics as well. Some other solutions like dialectical reading, information ethics and also institutional policymaking will also be taken into account at the end of the paper

    Gatekeeping Practices of Participants in a Digital Media Literacy Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

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    abstract: Long before “fake news” dominated the conversation within and about the media, media literacy advocates have championed the need for media literacy education that provides the tools for people to understand, analyze, and evaluate media messages. That the majority of U.S. adults now consume news on social media underscores the importance for students of all ages to be critical users of media. Furthermore, the affordances of social media to like, comment, and share news items within one’s network increases an individual’s responsibility to ascertain the veracity of news before using a social media megaphone to spread false information. Social media’s shareability can dictate how information spreads, increasing news consumers’ role as a gatekeeper of information and making media literacy education more important than ever. This research examines the media literacy practices that news consumers use to inform their gatekeeping decisions. Using a constant comparative coding method, the author conducted a qualitative analysis of hundreds of discussion board posts from adult participants in a digital media literacy Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to identify major themes and examine growth in participants’ sense of responsibility related to sharing news information, their feeling of empowerment to make informed decisions about the media messages they receive, and how the media literacy tools and techniques garnered from the MOOC have affected their daily media interactions. Findings emphasize the personal and contextual nature of media literacy, and that those factors must be addressed to ensure the success of a media literacy education program.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Journalism and Mass Communication 201

    Developing misinformation immunity:How to reason-check fallacious news in a human–computer interaction environment

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    To counter the fake news phenomenon, the scholarly community has attempted to debunk and prebunk disinformation. However, misinformation still constitutes a major challenge due to the variety of misleading techniques and their continuous updates which call for the exercise of critical thinking to build resilience. In this study we present two open access chatbots, the Fake News Immunity Chatbot and the Vaccinating News Chatbot, which combine Fallacy Theory and Human–Computer Interaction to inoculate citizens and communication gatekeepers against misinformation. These chatbots differ from existing tools both in function and form. First, they target misinformation and enhance the identification of fallacious arguments; and second, they are multiagent and leverage discourse theories of persuasion in their conversational design. After having described both their backend and their frontend design, we report on the evaluation of the user interface and impact on users’ critical thinking skills through a questionnaire, a crowdsourced survey, and a pilot qualitative experiment. The results shed light on the best practices to design user-friendly active inoculation tools and reveal that the two chatbots are perceived as increasing critical thinking skills in the current misinformation ecosystem

    Media literacy and COVID-19 communication: Work and home sphere differences

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    As a learning process wherein we ask questions to enhance knowledge, media literacy offers a powerful lens for examining how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts such as professional communicators shaping messages about COVID-19. Borrowing a page from Renee Hobbs’ (1998, 1999, 2010, 2011, 2021) media literacy education research, we sought to compare/contrast media content creators’ (journalism, advertising, public relations, marketing communication) information-seeking behaviors during the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic for both their paid work and unpaid volunteer work, as well as for their own and family edification. Blending the media literacy lens with social construction theory (Berger & Luckmann, 1967), our survey findings collected at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 suggest that professional communicators (N=174) relied more frequently on media sources (64.9%) for COVID-19 information for work (paid and unpaid) and on people such as medical professionals (51.5%) as sources for COVID-19 information for their own personal and family use. Other findings detail professional communicators’ use of media literacy learning processes of accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action
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