New Student Research on How News Affects Support for Climate Adaptation

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News media are the public’s primary source about risks such as climate change, but traditional journalistic approaches to climate change have failed to build support for collective social responses. Solutions journalism, an emerging practice focused on credible stories about responses to societal problems, may offer an alternate approach. From an online experiment with a convenience sample of U.S. undergraduates (N = 348), we found that solutions journalism stories were positively associated with perceived behavioral control, which mediated support for collective action for climate change adaptation. Additionally, attribution of responsibility to individuals and government, participant hope, and eco-anxiety were associated with support for collective action. Findings extend our understanding of how risk communication affects policy support for climate change adaptation and suggest that solutions journalism may allow journalists to communicate climate change’s danger without depressing support for social action to mitigate its effects.

Thier, K. & Lin, T. (2022). How solutions journalism shapes support for collective climate change adaption. Environmental Communication. https://doi.org//10.1080/17524032.2022.2143842

xiaoli nan

CHRC Director and Assistants Publish Systematic Review of Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Health Misinformation

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Health misinformation poses a significant threat to public health. Understanding why people believe health misinformation and who is at risk is crucial for developing effective interventions to reduce the harmful impact of misinformation. We conducted a systematic review of published empirical research that examined individual differences in susceptibility to health misinformation, focusing on the psychological, demographic, and behavioral correlates of health misinformation susceptibility. To guide our review on psychological correlates, we developed an integrative psychological model of susceptibility to health misinformation based on one’s ability and motivation to reason. We identified 47 publications (61 empirical studies) that met our criteria. Our review suggests that subject knowledge, literacy and numeracy, analytical thinking (vs. intuitive thinking), and trust in science confer strong resistance to health misinformation, whereas conspiracy thinking, religiosity, conservative ideology, and conservative party identification are associated with more susceptibility to health misinformation. Demographically, older age and higher educational attainment predict less susceptibility to health misinformation, whereas racial minority status is associated with greater susceptibility. Behaviorally, relying on health professionals or scientists as information sources predicts less susceptibility to health misinformation, whereas social media use is associated with greater susceptibility. Susceptibility to health misinformation is driven by multiple psychological processes. Interventions for reducing the spread and impact of health misinformation should be tailored to the psychological mechanism underlying susceptibility to health misinformation. Limited resources should be used to support interventions targeted at individuals at risk.

Nan, X., Wang, Y., & Thier, K. (2022). Why do people believe health misinformation and who is at risk? A systematic review of individual differences in susceptibility to health misinformation. Social Science & Medicine, 314, 115398. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115398

Watch Fall Virtual Seminar Series on Our YouTube Channel

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The CHRC welcomed Dr. Angela Cooke-Jackson and Dr. Brian Southwell as its Fall 2022 Virtual Seminar Series speakers.

Click here to see Dr. Cooke-Jackson’s talk, “Risk Communication: Engaging Community-Based Participatory Design Models to Increase Awareness and Partnerships within Underrepresented Black and Brown Communities,” which was on October 14.

Dr. Southwell’s talk “Misinformation as a Societal Concern ” wasNovember 11. Click here to watch a recording.

Dr. Cooke-Jackson’s expertise is in Health Communication and Behavioral Science. She uses community-based participatory research and media literacy to help communities curate and design innovative, practical applications for sustainable change. She is also the co-director of the Intimate Communication Lab. She envisions her research at the nexus of culture, health disparities, and marginalized populations. Her current scholarship incorporates intimacy and reproductive health to advance agency among underserved and marginalized people of color and gender minorities. She has worked extensively with memorable messages to construct theory and build research that addresses health outcomes, especially as it relates to sexual health. Her international research aspirations have taken her to Australia, Italy, Peru and Hong Kong. Her travels to Australia were most enriching because they strengthen her understanding of the similar health disparities among indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and people of color in the United States. Her research has appeared in numerous edited books and various journals including Health Communication, Communication Teacher, Communication Studies, Journal of Human Sexuality, Sexuality & Culture, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, Media Education Research Journal and Journal of Digital and Media Literacy. Her co-authored textbook by Rowman & Littlefield is titled Communicating Intimate Health.

Dr. Brian Southwell is Senior Director of the Science in the Public Sphere Program in RTI International’s Center for Communication Science. He also is Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine with Duke University and a graduate faculty member and Adjunct Associate Professor in Health Behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Southwell has published widely on topics such as public understanding of science. He co-founded the Duke Program on Medical Misinformation to improve patient-provider conversations about misinformation, and also has published a book, Misinformation and Mass Audiences, and various articles on the topic. Southwell was recently appointed to the Advisory Committee for the Council of Medical Specialty Societies-National Academy of Medicine-World Health Organization Collaboration on Identifying Credible Sources of Health Information in Social Media. He also has organized several summits on trust in science and medical misinformation, such as the Misinformation Solutions Forum sponsored by the Rita Allen Foundation in conjunction with the Aspen Institute. In addition, Southwell created and hosts The Measure of Everyday Life, a public radio show that translates research for general audiences on WNCU 90.7 FM, which is based at North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC.

 

    

 

CHRC Assistants, Director, and Affiliate Faculty Publish Research on Black Americans’ COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance

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Guided by the 5C (confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, and collective responsibility) model of vaccination behavior, we examine the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance (i.e. attitudes and intentions toward COVID-19 vaccination) among Black Americans, a group disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. We conducted a national survey of Black Americans (N = 1,497) in February/March 2021. We found that, among the five psychological antecedents, three (confidence, calculation – or extensive information searching, and collective responsibility) significantly predicted attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination and had indirect effects on vaccination intentions through vaccination attitudes. Two antecedents (confidence and collective responsibility) also directly predicted vaccination intentions. Our analysis suggests that a partially mediated model produced better fit than a fully mediated model. Developing culturally tailored interventions for Black Americans that build confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, highlight collective responsibility, and attend to Black Americans’ information sources is key to boosting Black Americans’ COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. Future research is needed to understand how historical and ongoing racism affects the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among Black Americans.

Thier, K., Wang, Y., Adebamowo, C., Ntiri, S. O., Quinn, S. C., & Nan, X. (2022). Understanding the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among Black Americans: Implications for vaccine communication. Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/17538068.2022.2117528

Yuan Wang

CHRC Assistants and Director Author Chapter Defining Health Misinformation

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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), we are entering an age of “infodemics,” with misinformation leading to mistrust in health authorities, increasing risk-taking behaviors, and undermining public health responses (WHO 2020). While concerns are rapidly growing about the prevalence and harmful impact of health misinformation (Nan, Wang, and Thier 2021), scholars have not clearly defined health misinformation or its components. Without a clear definition and shared agreement on what constitutes health misinformation, comparisons across studies purportedly about health misinformation will remain challenging, hampering our efforts to understand this phenomenon, assess its effects, and design effective interventions. However, defining misinformation in the first place is exceedingly difficult, partly because the benchmarks we often use to diagnose misinformation (e.g., scientific evidence, expert consensus) are sometimes moving targets (Vraga and Bode 2020). In light of the ongoing debate about the nature of misinformation and the urgent need for a clear definition of health misinformation, this chapter aims to critically review current definitions of health misinformation, identify key challenges in defining health misinformation, and finally propose a tentative, unifying definition of health misinformation to guide future research. We conclude by discussing directions for future efforts in refining the definition for health misinformation.

Wang, Y., Thier, K., & Nan, X. (2022). Defining health misinformation. In A. Keselman, C. A. Smith & A. Wilson (Eds.), Combating Online Health Misinformation: A Professional’s Guide to Helping the Public (pp.3-16). Rowman & Littlefield.

Scoping Review of COVID-19 Health Communication Research Authored by CHRC Student and Director

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This article reports a scoping review of emerging research on COVID-19 health communication. We reviewed and analyzed 206 articles published in 40 peer-reviewed communication journals between January 2020 to April 2021. Our review identified key study characteristics and overall themes and trends in this rapidly expanding field of research. Our review of health communication scholarship during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that health communication scholars have risen to the challenges and interrogated important issues in COVID-19 communication at the individual, group, organizational, and societal levels. We identified important gaps that warrant future research attention including experimental research that seeks to test the causal effects of communication, studies that evaluate communication interventions in under-served populations, research on mental health challenges imposed by the pandemic, and investigations on the promise of emerging communication technologies for supporting pandemic mitigation efforts.

Lin, T., & Nan, X. (2022). A Scoping Review of Emerging COVID-19 Health Communication Research in Communication and Media Journals. Health Communication, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2091916

Yuan Wang

CHRC Assistant Co-Authors Study About COVID-19 Vaccine Twitter Discourse

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Wang, Y., & Chen, Y. (2022). Characterizing discourses about COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter: a topic modeling and sentiment analysis approach. Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/17538068.2022.2054196

Evidence-based health communication is crucial for facilitating vaccine-related knowledge and addressing vaccine hesitancy. To that end, it is important to understand the discourses about COVID-19 vaccination and attend to the publics’ emotions underlying those discourses. We collect tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines from March 2020 to March 2021. In total, 304,292 tweets from 134,015 users are collected. We conduct a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling analysis and a sentiment analysis to analyze the discourse themes and sentiments. This study identifies seven themes of COVID-19 vaccine-related discourses. Vaccine advocacy (24.82%) is the most widely discussed topic about COVID-19 vaccines, followed by vaccine hesitancy (22.29%), vaccine rollout (12.99%), vaccine facts (12.61%), recognition for healthcare workers (12.47%), vaccine side effects (10.07%), and vaccine policies (4.75%). Trust is the most salient emotion associated with COVID-19 vaccine discourses, followed by anticipation, fear, joy, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Among the seven topics, vaccine advocacy tweets are most likely to receive likes and comments, and vaccine fact tweets are most likely to receive retweets. When talking about vaccines, publics’ emotions are dominated by trust and anticipation, yet mixed with fear and sadness. Although tweets about vaccine hesitancy are prevalent on Twitter, those messages receive fewer likes and comments than vaccine advocacy messages. Over time, tweets about vaccine advocacy and vaccine facts become more dominant whereas tweets about vaccine hesitancy become less dominant among COVID-19 vaccine discourses, suggesting that publics become more confident about COVID-19 vaccines as they obtain more information.

Sun Young Lee

CHRC Research Group Publishes Study on Visual Framing of Disasters

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Check out this new study from Assistant Professor Sun Young Lee (pictured), alum Dr. Jungkyu Rhys Lim, and candidate Duli Shi!

Lee, S. Y., Lim, J. R., & Shi, D. (2022). Visually Framing Disasters: Humanitarian Aid Organizations’ Use of Visuals on Social Media. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990221081046

The present study seeks to systematically describe how humanitarian aid organizations use visuals in their natural disaster-related social media messages and to analyze their effects on social media engagement. Using Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s (2011) four levels of visual framing, we performed a content analysis of 810 tweets from 38 aid organizations. The results showed that, overall, the organizations’ visuals had an emphasis on victims and on disaster relief efforts. The most effective types of visual framing, however, were not those the aid organizations most commonly used. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

Victoria Ledford

New CHRC Alumna and Student Research on Messages and Opioid Use Disorders Published in Health Communication

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Ma, Z., Ma, R., & Ledford, V. (2022). Is My Story Better Than His Story? Understanding the Effects and Mechanisms of Narrative Point of View in the Opioid Context. Health Communication, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2037198

Sharing the stories of people whose lives are impacted by Opioid Use Disorders (OUDs) can be a promising strategy to reduce stigma and increase support for beneficial public policies. Since a story can be told from a first-person or third-person point of view (POV), this study sought to (1) determine the relative persuasive effects of narrative POV and (2) identify the underlying psychological mechanisms, including character identification and psychological reactance, of such narratives. A one-way between-subjects experiment was conducted among a college student sample (N = 276). Narrative POV was manipulated by describing a college student’s OUD experience from either the first- or third-person POV. Findings demonstrated that POV did not influence identification but had a significant effect on reactance. Specifically, the first-person (vs. third-person) POV narrative led to lower reactance, which was associated with participants’ decreased desire to socially distance themselves from people with OUDs and stronger support for public health-oriented policies regarding OUDs. This study sheds light on the mixed findings revealed in the literature and has practical importance in health message design in the current opioid epidemic.

Yan Qin

CHRC Alum, Student, and Faculty Publish New Article in Mobile Media & Communication

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Qin, Y., Wang, X., & Kang, N. (2021). A meta-analysis of the overall effect of mHealth physical activity interventions for weight loss and the moderating effect of behavioral change theories, techniques, and mobile technologies. Mobile Media & Communication, 20501579211054929

Mobile technologies offer the potential for efficacious and cost-effective lifestyle interventions for weight loss. Extant research indicates that mobile health (mHealth) lifestyle interventions are potentially effective and practical methods of weight loss, but it is less known what intervention characteristics are associated with weight loss effects. This meta-analysis examined the effectiveness of mHealth physical activity interventions for weight loss compared with non-technology/usual care interventions and the moderating effects of behavioral change theories, techniques, and mobile technologies. A total of 24 studies were identified based on inclusion criteria. Weight loss was the primary outcome. The results showed a medium significant effect size (d = 0.395; 95% CI = 0.243, 0.546; Z = 5.107, p < 0.001; N = 5146) favoring mHealth interventions. Interventions were significantly more effective when wearable devices were used (QB = 4.102, df = 1, p < 0.05) and when feedback was employed (QB = 4.566, df = 1, p < 0.05). The implications for future mHealth intervention design are discussed.

https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579211054929