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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>

This thesis explores the communication of health knowledge among new parents in Sweden. Based on three separate studies, the thesis employs a selection of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches, mainly originating from mediated discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Study 1 takes a broad view on the object and asks how knowledge circulates and emerges in a particular arena for parental knowledge. Drawing on nine months of online fieldwork on a discussion forum thread for expectant parents, the study shows that communication of knowledge is engendered by entextualizations and recenterings of previous experiences, including encounters with discourse. This fact challenges categorical conceptions that construct some sources of health knowledge as trustworthy and others as unreliable, and thus, potentially harmful. Study 2 narrows the focus to professionals typically perceived as producers of parental health knowledge, namely, midwives who give prenatal education classes. Drawing on a dataset comprising observations of classes as well as interviews with midwives, the study throws analytical light on anticipatory discourse, that is, discourse designed to dictate and influence the future, and elucidates some of the ways in which midwives prepare the participants for their upcoming delivery by discursively constructing links to these future events. Study 3, finally, takes the perspective of a single individual in whose life several forms of communicated parental knowledge converge as she becomes a mother. The study focuses on a period during which this individual struggles with breastfeeding problems. A combination of the notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body is here employed to grasp this experience as shaped in relation to discourse regarding child care and health. Looking at narrative data through this lens, the study shows how this individual connects failure to follow official breastfeeding recommendations to failure to perform child care in an appropriate way. At heart, the study makes a case for the moral loading of health knowledge and cautions against the assumption that authoritative medical knowledge is the only means for taking action that a new mother might need. In conclusion, the present thesis utilizes a combination of theoretical and methodological tools from MDA and linguistic anthropology to enable a discourse analysis of health communication that privileges a view of language in use as accumulating vis-à-vis engendering meaning over time and in relation to social action. Invoking the notion of ideologies of communication, it demonstrates that parents’ knowledge about their children’s health is a non-neutral issue, and that instrumental aspects of parental health knowledge can never be isolated from moral ideas regarding how particular parenting practices are to be carried out. At the same time, the thesis points out that while representatives of institutions of the welfare state may produce messages to communicate health knowledge, the knowledge obtained by individuals is the product of myriad discursive encounters and other experiences, of which the discourse produced by representatives of state institutions constitutes only one share. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Accepted.</p>

Os Conselhos de fiscalização do exercício de profissionais da área da saúde são órgãos públicos, e, como tais, devem ter suas ações de comunicação orientadas pelos preceitos constitucionais, que determinam as ações de publicidade (o tornar público) pautadas pelos princípios do interesse público. O trabalho investiga, por meio dos procedimentos de análise de conteúdo de Laurence Bardin, se os propósitos constitucionais são cumpridos pelos Conselhos estudados (Conselho Regional de Medicina de São Paulo, Conselho Regional de Enfermagem de São Paulo Conselho Regional de Fisioterapia e Terapia Ocupacional da 3ª região) em suas ações e políticas de comunicação. As inferências derivadas da utilização das técnicas de Análise Categorial do Conteúdo - aplicada sobre os editoriais das publicações dos Conselhos - e da Análise da Enunciação do Conteúdo - aplicadas às entrevistas dos presidentes dos três órgãos, permitem compreender o direcionamento das ações de comunicação dos três Conselhos voltado aos interesses privados, restando parcial ou totalmente ausente as abordagens de estrito interesse público. / The Boards of health responsible for inspecting the acts of healthcare professional are public organs, and as such, should have their communication actions guided by constitutional principles, which determine the actions of publicity (making facts public) guided by the principles of public interest. The paper investigates, through the procedures of content Analysis, by Laurence Bardin, if the constitutional purpose is fulfilled by the councils studied (Regional Council of Medicine of São Paulo, Regional Nursing Council of São Paulo Regional Council of Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy of the 3rd region) in their actions and policies of communication. The inferences derived from the use of two techniques: Categorical Content Analysis - applied over the editorials of published advice - and the Enunciation of Content Analysis - applied over the interviews with the presidents of the three organizations, allow us to understand the direction of the communication actions of the three Councils aimed to private interests, and partially or totally absent approaches to strict public interest matters.