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<p>   </p> <p>Health-related misinformation presents a significant threat to public health and wellbeing. Misinformation exposure is associated with decreased compliance with public health initiatives, decreased trust in science, and greater levels of disease transmission. Unfortunately, fact-checking is not a panacea for mitigating the negative effects associated with misinformation exposure. The present dissertation, guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior, investigated across two studies whether providing participants with different levels of media literacy education could enable them to successfully determine news articles, on a variety of different health topics, contained either legitimate or illegitimate information. Both studies utilized a three-group, pretest-posttest, between-subjects experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to either a brief or detailed media literacy skill promotion message, or a no-message control. The messages took the form of Facebook posts from a fictitious organization dedicated to promoting media literacy. The first study recruited 305 undergraduate students. Results from the first study indicated that participants assigned to the detailed message condition were more successful compared to the other conditions in identifying health-related misinformation. A content analysis of participants’ open-ended responses revealed that participants in the detailed message group were the most likely to utilize skills related to media literacy and were the least likely to utilize heuristics or to guess when determining whether news articles contained legitimate or illegitimate information. The second study sought to replicate and extend the results of the first study in a sample of adults recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The results of the second study found that the detailed message condition promoted a greater ability to identify misinformation compared to either the brief message or control condition. Similarly, participants in the second study were most likely to use skills related to media literacy when completing the misinformation identification task. The results suggest that brief media literacy messages may be insufficient in enabling participants to successfully identify health-related misinformation online. However, more detailed media literacy education messages show promise for potentially limiting the spread of misinformation online. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. </p> <p>  </p>

Research shows that health disparities exist among patients of varying races, ethnicities, and cultures in the United States. Numerous studies have suggested that these disparities may be partly associated with physician-patient communication. The larger project that this thesis is a part of is a mixed-methods analysis of physician-patient communication across patient race, ethnicity, and culture. This thesis specifically excluded qualitative studies and focused on how such communication can affect health outcomes. Sixty-nine studies were identified and appraised for quality. Of these, only four associated physician-patient communication with the health outcomes of patients. These studies had inconsistent results, highlighting the gap in research exploring the association between communication, patient ethnicity, and health outcomes.

Background An increasing number of patients are seeking health information on the internet. Health literacy and the quality of information are crucial to enable patients to find relevant high-quality information. Objectives To investigate the relevance of quality criteria for health information and to determine the health literacy of skin cancer patients (SC) in comparison to those without skin cancer (NSC). Methods Between December 2021 until February 2022 we undertook an online survey on the importance of multiple criteria to investigate the relevance of quality criteria of online health information. SC and NSC were eligible for participation. The questionnaire assessed participants´ health information-seeking behavior and the evaluation of relevance of quality criteria for health information on a 5-point-LIKERT-Scale. The participants´ health literacy was measured according to the health literacy measurement scale ranging from 0-100. Comparisons between SC and NSC were investigated with t-tests. Results We retrieved data from 268 participants, of whom 98 (38%) were SC. Participants assigned the highest relevance to the health information topics treatment (4.7 ± 0.64) and effects of a disease (4.49 ± 0.76). Participants ranked the content of information with a mean of 4.72 (±0.57) to be the most relevant criterion, followed by objectivity (4.61 ± 0.67) and completeness of the information (4.59 ± 0.61). Participants showed the highest competence in understanding of information (62.4 ± 22.5) and in disease prevention (58.32 ± 22.9). They reached low values in accessing health related information (46.78 ± 25.62) and appraising it (33.16 ± 20.11). Subgroup analysis indicated that SC had a greater need for practical information that is helpful in dealing with a disease compared to NSC. They showed significantly lower health literacy than NSC. Conclusions Our study documents that SC and NSC have a high need for different dimensions of quality of health information. These differences in the importance of criteria should be considered in the development of future targeted health information.

Health officials estimate that the 2014 Ebola crisis disproportionately victimized women, who made up 75% of the disease's victims. This interdisciplinary study has two main goals. The first is to evaluate the news media's performance in relation to their representation of women caught up in the Ebola crisis because the media play an important role in influencing public responses to health. This study sought to understand the information behavior patterns of journalists who covered the Ebola crisis by analyzing how job tasks influence a journalist's information behavior. This study employed qualitative methods to study the perceptions of journalists who covered the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Liberian and American journalists who covered the outbreak to understand the choices that guided their reporting of the Ebola crisis. A content analysis of The New York Times, The Times, and The Inquirer was also conducted to examine the new media's representation of women in an outbreak which mostly victimized women. The findings suggest that covering a dangerous assignment like Ebola affected the information behavior patterns of journalists. Audience needs, the timing of coverage, fear, and the accessibility of sources, were some of the factors that influenced the news gathering decisions taken by the reporters. The findings also suggest that women were mostly underrepresented by the media as sources, experts and subjects.