Department of Communication, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA.
Cancer Control and Population Sciences, Huntsman Cancer Institute, Salt Lake City, USA.
Ann Behav Med. 2024 Nov 16;58(12):820-831. doi: 10.1093/abm/kaae054.
Inaccurate cancer news can have adverse effects on patients and families. One potential way to minimize this is through media literacy training-ideally, training tailored specifically to the evaluation of health-related media coverage.
We test whether an abbreviated health-focused media literacy intervention improves accuracy discernment or sharing discernment for cancer news headlines and also examine how these outcomes compare to the effects of a generic media literacy intervention.
We employ a survey experiment conducted using a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 1,200). Respondents were assigned to either a health-focused media literacy intervention, a previously tested generic media literacy intervention, or the control. They were also randomly assigned to rate either perceived accuracy of headlines or sharing intentions. Intervention effects on accurate and inaccurate headline ratings were tested using OLS regressions at the item-response level, with standard errors clustered on the respondent and with headline fixed effects.
We find that the health-focused media literacy intervention increased skepticism of both inaccurate (a 5.6% decrease in endorsement, 95% CI [0.1%, 10.7%]) and accurate (a 7.6% decrease, 95% CI [2.4%, 12.8%]) news headlines, and accordingly did not improve discernment between the two. The health-focused media literacy intervention also did not significantly improve sharing discernment. Meanwhile, the generic media literacy intervention had little effect on perceived accuracy outcomes, but did significantly improve sharing discernment.
These results suggest further intervention development and refinement are needed before scaling up similarly targeted health information literacy tools, particularly focusing on building trust in legitimate sources and accurate content.
不准确的癌症新闻可能会对患者和家属产生不良影响。一种潜在的方法是通过媒体素养培训来减少这种影响，理想情况下，培训应该专门针对评估与健康相关的媒体报道。
我们测试了一种简化的以健康为重点的媒体素养干预措施是否可以提高对癌症新闻标题的准确性识别或分享识别能力，并比较这些结果与通用媒体素养干预措施的效果。
我们采用了一项基于全美代表性样本（N=1200）的调查实验。受访者被分配到以健康为重点的媒体素养干预组、之前测试过的通用媒体素养干预组或对照组。他们还被随机分配来评估标题的感知准确性或分享意图。使用 OLS 回归在项目反应水平上测试干预对准确和不准确标题评分的影响，标准误差在受访者和标题上进行聚类，并固定标题效应。
我们发现，以健康为重点的媒体素养干预措施增加了对不准确（支持率下降 5.6%，95%CI[0.1%，10.7%]）和准确（支持率下降 7.6%，95%CI[2.4%，12.8%]）新闻标题的怀疑态度，因此并没有改善两者之间的辨别能力。以健康为重点的媒体素养干预措施也没有显著提高分享的辨别能力。与此同时，通用媒体素养干预措施对感知准确性结果的影响较小，但显著提高了分享的辨别能力。
这些结果表明，在扩大类似的有针对性的健康信息素养工具之前，需要进一步的干预措施开发和改进，特别是要关注建立对合法来源和准确内容的信任。
