Youth and Information Quality: An Intersectional Exploration of How Teens Assess Fitness Information on Social Media
Open Access
- Author:
- Booth, Kayla M
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 02, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Eileen Trauth, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Eileen Trauth, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Lynette Yarger, Committee Member
Michael McNeese, Committee Member
Karen Treat Keifer-Boyd, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Information Quality
Youth
Intersectionality
Social Media
Information Behavior
Teens - Abstract:
- With the Age of Information, particularly Web 2.0 and social media, the onus of evaluating information has shifted from traditional gatekeepers to Internet users. This shift has birthed numerous veins of scholarly inquiry designed to explore how people make decisions about the content with which they interact online. While interest in information behavior is widespread across disciplines and user groups, there has been a particular focus on how youth assess information based on their relative vulnerability, given their stage of cognitive development and limited life experience (Gasser et al., 2012). Situated within Information Systems (IS) research, this dissertation explores the ways in which young people assess information via social media. In particular, this study focuses on the context of fitness (nutrition and exercise) information. This context is particularly significant given: (a) teens in the United States search for nutrition and exercise information more than any other types of health information online (Wartella et al., 2015), (b) there is an expansive amalgamation of both healthy and disordered fitness content on social media (Carrotte et al., 2015), and (c) a growing body of research suggests that young people make real health-related decisions based on the information they find online (Fox & Duggan, 2013). Two theories inform this study's design. The first is Gasser et al.'s (2012) Youth-Oriented Information Quality Theoretical Framework, which emphasizes a process and context-oriented approach to understanding how youth make decisions about online content. Developed by scholars at the Youth and Media Center at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, this framework explores how youth search for, evaluate, and create information online and use these processes to make decisions about information quality. Building on an IS foundation invested in how diverse users interact with information and technology, the second theoretical foundation is an Intersectionality approach. Rather than examining singular categories of identity characteristics (race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.), the guiding research questions ask how intersections of young users' identities relate to their search, evaluation, and creation processes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 teenagers (ages 13-18) in the United States to examine the ways in which the intersections of identity characteristics relate to the ways in which young people make decisions about the fitness information they interact with via social media. Data collection and analysis were informed by a hybrid interpretive-critical epistemology that values the subjective experiences and realities of the participants, while also exploring the structural and systemic inequalities that inform these experiences. The results suggest that young people care about and have active strategies for determining the quality of visual and textual fitness information via social media and that differences emerge across participants' intersecting identities. This dissertation contributes to: (a) theory by applying and extending Gasser et al.'s (2012) preliminary framework and, (b) methodology by offering a reconciliation between the identity vs. structure debate as to how to conduct Intersectionality research through a blended interpretive-critical epistemological approach. In terms of practice, this youth-oriented approach provides insight into what teens are already doing to make decisions about high-stakes online content, as well as how to move forward to collaboratively build educational interventions that develop these skills. These interventions are particularly critical to build at a time of fake news, when society is asking large-scale questions about media, information, and truth.