Dataset Information

'There were some clues': a qualitative study of heuristics used by parents of adolescents to make credibility judgements of online health news articles citing research.

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE:To identify how parents judge the credibility of online health news stories with links to scientific research. DESIGN:This qualitative study interviewed parents who read online stories about e-cigarettes and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination published by top-tier US news organisations. Researchers asked participants to describe elements of a story that influenced their judgement about content credibility. Researchers analysed transcripts using inductive and deductive techniques. Deductive analysis drew on cognitive heuristics previously identified as being used by the public to judge online health information. Inductive analysis allowed the emergence of new heuristics, especially relating to health. SETTING:The US National Cancer Institute's Audience Research Lab in Maryland, in August-November 2018. PARTICIPANTS:Sixty-four parents with at least one child between the ages of 9 and 17 residing in Maryland, Virginia, or the District of Columbia participated. Researchers randomly assigned 31 parents to the HPV vaccination story and 33 to the e-cigarette story. RESULTS:Evidence of existing heuristics, including reputation, endorsement, consistency, self-confirmation, expectancy violation and persuasive intent emerged from the interviews, with participants deeming stories credible when mentioning physicians (reputation heuristic) and/or consistent with information provided by personal physicians (consistency heuristic). Participants also described making credibility judgements based on presence of statistics, links to scientific research and their general feelings about news media. In relation to presence of statistics and links, participants reported these elements increased the credibility of the news story, whereas their feelings about the news media decreased their credibility judgement. CONCLUSIONS:Parents used a constellation of heuristics to judge the credibility of online health news stories. Previously identified heuristics for online health information are also applicable in the context of health news stories. The findings have implications for initiatives in education, health communication and journalism directed towards increasing the public's engagement with health news and their credibility judgements.

SUBMITTER: Maggio LA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7451268 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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'There were some clues': a qualitative study of heuristics used by parents of adolescents to make credibility judgements of online health news articles citing research.

Maggio Lauren A LA Krakow Melinda M Moorhead Laura L LL

BMJ open 20200826 8

<h4>Objective</h4>To identify how parents judge the credibility of online health news stories with links to scientific research.<h4>Design</h4>This qualitative study interviewed parents who read online stories about e-cigarettes and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination published by top-tier US news organisations. Researchers asked participants to describe elements of a story that influenced their judgement about content credibility. Researchers analysed transcripts using inductive and deductiv ...[more]

PMID: 32847924

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Project description:AimPrevious research has focused on accuracy associated with real and fake news presented in the form of news headlines only, which does not capture the rich context news is frequently encountered in real life. Additionally, while previous studies on evaluation of real and fake news have mostly focused on characteristics of the evaluator (i.e., analytical reasoning), characteristics of the news stimuli (i.e., news source credibility) and the interplay between the two have been largely ignored. To address these research gaps, this project examined the role of analytical reasoning and news source credibility on evaluation of real and fake full-length news story articles. The project considered both accuracy and perceived credibility ratings as outcome variables, thus qualifying previous work focused solely on news detection accuracy.MethodWe conducted two independent but parallel studies, with Study 2 as a direct replication of Study 1, employing the same design but in a larger sample (Study 1: N = 292 vs. Study 2: N = 357). In both studies, participants viewed 12 full-length news articles (6 real, 6 fake), followed by prompts to evaluate each article's veracity and credibility. Participants were randomly assigned to view articles with a credible or non-credible source and completed the Cognitive Reflection Test as well as short demographic questions.FindingsConsistent across both studies, higher analytical reasoning was associated with greater fake news accuracy, while analytical reasoning was not associated with real news accuracy. In addition, in both studies, higher analytical reasoning was associated with lower perceived credibility for fake news, while analytical reasoning was not associated with perceived credibility for real news. Furthermore, lower analytical reasoning was associated with greater accuracy for real (but not fake) news from credible compared to non-credible sources, with this effect only detected in Study 2.ConclusionsThe novel results generated in this research are discussed in light of classical vs. naturalistic accounts of decision-making as well as cognitive processes underlying news articles evaluation. The results extend previous findings that analytical reasoning contributes to fake news detection to full-length news articles. Furthermore, news-related cues such as the credibility of the news source systematically affected discrimination ability between real and fake news.

Project description:The microbiome is a matter of interest for science, consumers and business. Our objective is to quantify that interest in academic journals and newspapers, both quantitatively and by study design. We calculated the number of articles on the microbiome from the total number of biomedicine articles featured in both PubMed and Spanish science news agency SINC, from 2008 to 2018. We used the Factiva database to identify news stories on microbiome papers in three general newspapers (The New York Times, The Times and El País) and three business newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Expansión), from 2007 to 2019. Then, we compared news stories with microbiome papers in PubMed, while also analyzing the frequencies of five study design types, both in the newspapers and in the papers themselves. Microbiome papers represented 0.8% of biomedicine papers in PubMed from 2008 to 2018 (increasing from 0.4% to 1.4%), while microbiome news published by SINC represented 1.6% of total biomedical news stories during the same period (increasing from 0.2% to 2.2%). The number of news stories on microbiome papers correlated with the number of microbiome papers (0.91, p < 0.001) featured in general newspapers, but not in business ones. News stories on microbiome papers represented 78.9% and 42.7% of all microbiome articles in general and business newspapers, respectively. Both media outlet types tended to over-report observational studies in humans while under-reporting environmental studies, while the representation of systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials, randomized controlled trials and animal/laboratory studies was similar when comparing newspapers and PubMed. The microbiome is receiving increasing attention in academic journals and newspapers. News stories on the microbiome in general and business newspapers are mostly based on research findings and are more interested in observational studies in humans and less in environmental studies compared to PubMed.

Project description:BackgroundRapid identification of subject experts for medical topics helps in improving the implementation of discoveries by speeding the time to market drugs and aiding in clinical trial recruitment, etc. Identifying such people who influence opinion through social network analysis is gaining prominence. In this work, we explore how to combine named entity recognition from unstructured news articles with social network analysis to discover opinion leaders for a given medical topic.MethodsWe employed a Conditional Random Field algorithm to extract three categories of entities from health-related new articles: Person, Organization and Location. We used the latter two to disambiguate polysemy and synonymy for the person names, used simple rules to identify the subject experts, and then applied social network analysis techniques to discover the opinion leaders among them based on their media presence. A network was created by linking each pair of subject experts who are mentioned together in an article. The social network analysis metrics (including centrality metrics such as Betweenness, Closeness, Degree and Eigenvector) are used for ranking the subject experts based on their power in information flow.ResultsWe extracted 734,204 person mentions from 147,528 news articles related to obesity from January 1, 2007 through July 22, 2010. Of these, 147,879 mentions have been marked as subject experts. The F-score of extracting person names is 88.5%. More than 80% of the subject experts who rank among top 20 in at least one of the metrics could be considered as opinion leaders in obesity.ConclusionThe analysis of the network of subject experts with media presence revealed that an opinion leader might have fewer mentions in the news articles, but a high network centrality measure and vice-versa. Betweenness, Closeness and Degree centrality measures were shown to supplement frequency counts in the task of finding subject experts. Further, opinion leaders missed in scientific publication network analysis could be retrieved from news articles.

Project description:BackgroundThe h-index is increasingly being used as a measure of individual research achievement (IRA). More than 4876 citing articles have been published and indexed in Web of Science. The articles citing the h-index that have made the greatest contribution to scientific academics are still unknown. It is also unclear which subject categories (SCs) can be classified based on their keywords.MethodsThese 4976 citing articles have been collected from the Web of Science since 2005. SCs were classified using chord diagrams to visualize their associations of SCs and documents in 100 top-cited articles (T100hciting). In addition to chord diagrams, 6 visualizations were used to illustrate study results: choropleth maps were used to depict the geographical distribution of publications across countries, network diagrams were created by using coword analysis, box plots were created to complement the network diagrams, Sankey diagrams highlighted the 5 most important elements in each article entity, the dot plot was used for displaying T100hciting, and a radar plot was used to present the top 10 high-IRA elements of countries, institutes, departments, and authors based on category, journal impact factor, authorship, and L-index scores.ResultsA coword cluster analysis indicates that the majority of articles come from the US (918, 18%) and China (603, 12%), the top 2 SCs are h-index and bibliometric analysis, and the top 5 countries account for 55% in T100hciting, such as the US (25%), Spain (10%), Netherlands (9%), China (6%), and Belgium (5%). In T100hciting, 4 SCs are included, namely, the h-index (72%), bibliometric analysis (24%), physics & multidisciplinary (3%), and infectious diseases (1%).ConclusionA total of 7 visualizations were used to display the results in this study. Chord diagrams are suggested as a tool for future bibliographical studies to classify SCs Future bibliometrics with chord diagrams should not be limited to the topic of h-index-citing articles, as we did in this study.

Dataset Information

'There were some clues': a qualitative study of heuristics used by parents of adolescents to make credibility judgements of online health news articles citing research.

Publications

'There were some clues': a qualitative study of heuristics used by parents of adolescents to make credibility judgements of online health news articles citing research.

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