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People's willingness to get vaccinated determines whether the campaigns against the COVID-19 pandemic can be successful in part. Considering the fact that both foreigners and its nationals are exposed to the risk of infection in China, the Chinese government has taken measures favorable to foreigners in terms of the vaccination, yet South Korean sojourners were reluctant to get China-developed COVID-19 vaccines. This study employed the trust in institutions and trust in media as a theoretical framework and seeks to analyze how these two affect South Korean sojourners' intention to get Chinese COVID-19 vaccines. 25 South Korean sojourners living in Beijing participated in semi-structured interviews. The results showed that the mistrust South Korean sojourners have in China's institutions and media, both traditional and social media, led to their reluctance to get Chinese COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, South Korean sojourners' higher interpersonal trust in their peers also influenced their willingness to get vaccines. This study further interpreted such results from the perspective of cultural traits and national properties.
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The paper examines the relationship between trust in media and information seeking from the media dependency theory perspective. Its purpose is to explore different goals in media use during crisis, and the role of trust and perception of misinformation. Research was done in Croatia in spring 2020, when citizens were experiencing a crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and an earthquake hitting the capital city of Zagreb. It is based on an online survey on a convenience sample (N = 741). Three media use goals were discovered: social understanding, self-understanding, and the play&communication goal. Education, age, and gender were proven to be important in predicting media use during a crisis. Media trust is correlated to social understanding goals and traditional media use, while the perception of being vulnerable to misinformation is correlated to withdrawal from media use. © 2023, Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar. All rights reserved.
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Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid change in the delivery of education with remote working, people required to stay home, and maintaining social distance when at work, all of which had an impact on teamwork and team relationships. Aim/Method As a newly appointed Lead Practice Educator I was responsible for re-establishing the team, with the aim to prioritise developing the relationships with each other to increase their sense of team and belonging, to enable the continued provision of high-quality training. Results With feedback from the educators a variety of activities was planned such as formal and social catch ups utilising the outdoor spaces around the trust. We celebrated team members and wins in the team, both virtually and face to face and via email making use of feedback from #feedbackfriday on Twitter to share with the wider team. One of the activities that was particularly successful was a team breakfast, staff commented how much they enjoyed spending time together engaging in spontaneous conversations, something that is challenging to replicate in the virtual environment. New staff were buddied up with more established members of the team, and the educators were encouraged to work together providing a more joined up approach. In addition, a Friday email was implemented to streamline communication within the team. Discussion/Conclusion During and after the activities team relationships have flourished-by working apart they became stronger individual educators and now their combined efforts have resulted in a more cohesive and adaptive team. They collaborate to deliver more comprehensive local inductions, highlight patient safety problems, and provide solutions by pooling their resources to elicit a more joined up approach across our 3 directorates.
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Purpose: The paper aims to investigate the most influential social media information sources to trust in healthcare facilities. The article shows a valuable point of reference for understanding how social media becomes the casting of social capital. Design/methodology/approach: This paper has taken 660 responses from the people who used social media for healthcare information in the mid of 2020 during the pandemic. The people were approached through different social media groups. The paper conducted structural equation modelling (SEM). The result has shown that with the instigating power of social capital where people put trust in social media information during pandemics. Findings: The findings demonstrated that personal sources, government organisations and healthcare professionals are the most influential sources of social media. In order to effectively ensure the encompassing provision of COVID-19 health services, this article argues that social capital considerations establish trust between healthcare facilities seeking community to healthcare information providers. Research limitations/implications: This research has signified that social cohesion and concern for community welfare instigated people to engage in social media communication. The inherent social capital belongings influence people to trust the sources of health information from selected sources that appear on social media. Practical implications: Healthcare policymakers may utilise this intense feeling of belongingness and cohesion of social capital and use social media platforms to spread health-related information. Originality/value: The study shows social capital has the strength to entice people into healthcare-seeking behaviour. In this era, social capital is reformulated to digital social capital through social media and strongly affects people's trust. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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In this study, we extend the literature on the rally ‘round the flag phenomenon, that is, that international crises tend to cause an increase in citizens' approval of political institutions. We advance this literature and highlight its relevance for political communication research in three ways: 1) by theorizing and empirically testing two arguments for why rally effects should extend to trust in the news media on the institutional level, 2) by providing empirical evidence on how rally effects on trust in the media develop over time during an international crisis, and 3) by theorizing and testing the conditions under which rally effects on media trust are more likely to occur by studying heterogeneous effects. Through a panel design with a pre-crisis baseline of Norwegian citizens' trust in news media, we find evidence to suggest that the compound effect of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis caused a long-lasting increase in trust in the news media in Norway, and that the degree of increase varied by citizens' education and whether they belonged to a "high-risk” group. We also provide evidence to suggest that rally effects on news media trust are contingent on how important the news media is as a source of information about the crisis and the "trust nexus” between media trust and political trust. These insights extend our current understanding of how times of crisis affect trust in the news media. © 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on healthcare in a way that had never been seen before in the UK. Scientists and their role in developing policy was the focus of the media for the first time making effective public engagement from healthcare scientists more important than ever before. While completing science communication activities is now mandatory for trainees and researchers, there is no communication training as part of the formalised training pathway. In the most recent Public Attitudes to Science report 38% of respondents felt scientists were poor communicators and 49% felt that scientists did not put enough effort into showing their work. This demonstrates that providing communication skills training for healthcare scientists is vital to support engagement and build trust with the public and patients. A 3250 outreach and engagement grant was received from the Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM) to commission at science comedy training session and put on two 'Stand up for Healthcare Science' comedy shows. The fully booked training was run by Dr Steve Cross who helped the participants define what made comedy funny to them and developed comedy sets about their work using emotion to engage audiences. The two Stand up for Healthcare Science shows were performed online each featuring six healthcare scientists and receiving over 670 views on YouTube. Four of the participants have gone onto perform at additional science comedy events as a direct result of attending the SfAM funded science comedy training sessions. Additional participants have reported that the sessions gave them more confidence in their communication and public speaking skills that they would continue to use in future outreach work. This was a highly unusual outreach and engagement project that gave healthcare scientists new skills to effectively engage (and entertain!) their audiences.
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The COVID-19 pandemic raised important questions about news patterns of interaction on social network sites (SNS) and instant messaging platforms (IM), especially in the context of the massive re-placement of face-to-face interactions with mediated interactions, due to the restrictive measures taken in many parts of the world. In this context, by means of a national survey conducted in Romania (N=1160), we investigated people's willingness to engage on social media and instant messaging platforms about the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that people are eager to share information about the topic on both SNS and IM, less interested in getting involved in debates, and even less in voluntary work. All these behaviors are predicted by trust of SNS and news consumption on these platforms, perceived size of the personal digital network, belief in conspiracy theories about the virus, uncertainty about the impact of the crisis, and level of education. © 2022, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration. All rights reserved.
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COVID-19, as a major public health crisis, has triggered nationalism to different degrees all around the world. This study utilises an online survey to explore the relationships between media use, media trust, and nationalism in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the level of nationalism was still considerably high in China at the time of the pandemic and that the role of the media in nation-state building enterprises remains significant. It becomes more pervasive after the news media's adoption of digitalisation. Our study argues that contemporary China's expression of nationalism is socially constructed by media and rooted in its Chinese Confucian culture. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is increasingly designing the news media and manages social media. It has already successfully constructed a sense of nationalism to facilitate its own interests in response to the national crisis. This has led nationalism being embodied in the media's constructed social reality.
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Mass media, television and newspapers used to be the preferred channels for medical news and information. Over the past two decades, the media landscape has profoundly changed due to the ubiquitous use of social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc). The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the impact of this new media dynamic, not only on the trustworthiness of medical information but also on citizens' trust in medical expertise. This article raises two questions: How are social media deployed to both undermine and enhance public trust in scientific expertise during a health crisis? And how can medical experts and professionals navigate this new media dynamic that has partly replaced the institutional flow of communication between experts and citizens?
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ZusammenfassungEine zu geringe Impfbereitschaft zählt zu den größten globalen Gesundheitsgefahren und war in der COVID-19-Pandemie auch in Deutschland eine der großen Herausforderungen der öffentlichen Gesundheit. Die Identifikation potenzieller Einflussfaktoren auf das Impfverhalten ist deshalb für eine zielgruppengerechte Gesundheitskommunikation von großer Bedeutung. Studierende sind eine besonders wichtige Zielgruppe der Prävention und Gesundheitsförderung. Der Beitrag geht mit Hilfe einer Online-Befragung der Studierenden einer westdeutschen Universität (n = 1398) im Sommersemester 2021 den Fragen nach, inwieweit sich geimpfte und ungeimpfte Studierende mit hoher bzw. niedrigerer Impfintention hinsichtlich a) ihrer Medien- und Informationsnutzung und b) ihres Vertrauens in Medien und Informationsquellen in der COVID-19-Pandemie unterschieden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen z. T. deutliche Differenzen. Während geimpfte Studierende sich intensiver informierten und hierfür auch stärker auf klassische Medienangebote zurückgriifen, vertrauten insbesondere ungeimpfte Studierende mit niedrigerer Impfintention u. a. mehr auf alternative Nachrichtenseiten und Blogs.
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Risk perception and information seeking behaviors are affected by individual psychological and situational factors. In the background of COVID-19 prevailing for a long period, this study examined Chinese people's information seeking and processing behavior by the RISP model, which focused on the impact of individual risk perception, affective response, perceived information-gathering capacity, and media trust and the impact of the above factors on information seeking. This study designed an online survey with gender and age quotas among the Chinese population, including a total of 675 valid samples. It was found that the Chinese public's risk perception to pandemic had a positive effect on perceived information-gathering capacity and media trust. Furthermore, both positive emotional responses and negative emotional responses had a positive effect on information seeking behavior. Nurturing positive emotion engendered a holistic perception in pandemic information seeking. In addition, media trust, perceived information-gathering capacity, and subjective norms also positively impact information seeking behavior.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Humans , COVID-19/prevention & control , COVID-19/psychology , Pandemics/prevention & control , Information Seeking Behavior , Emotions , PerceptionABSTRACT
We analyze short-term media trust changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, their ideological drivers and consequences based on panel data in German-speaking Switzerland. We thereby differentiate trust in political information from different types of traditional and non-traditional media. COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment, in which citizens' media trust at the outbreak of the crisis is compared with the same variables after the severe lockdown measures were lifted. Our data reveal that (1) media trust is consequential as it is associated with people's willingness to follow Covid-19 regulations;(2) media trust changes during the pandemic, with trust levels for most media decreasing, with the exception of public service broadcasting;(3) trust losses are hardly connected to ideological divides in Switzerland. Our findings highlight that public service broadcasting plays an exceptional role in the fight against a pandemic and that contrary to the US, no partisan trust divide occurs.
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This study investigates the comparative prevalence of information avoidance concerning the coronavirus and its relationship with media evaluation and use. We argue that information avoidance is a behavior that broadly signifies the intermittent and conscious practice of shunning specific content. It is problematic because having an informed citizenry is essential, especially during a global pandemic. Given the global affectedness of the world by the coronavirus, we believe in the necessity for international comparative research and conduct our study in Pakistan, Germany, and Indonesia. Based on the existing literature, which stems predominantly from the Global North, we assume that media use and its evaluations are associated with information avoidance and test our assumptions against cross-cultural differences. Hence, we collected data in Germany (n = 822), Indonesia (n = 1164), and Pakistan (n = 467). The results indicate important differences with regard to the prevalence of information avoidance as well as media use and its evaluations across the three countries. The analysis further confirms a rather stable relationship between media evaluations with information avoidance but revealed interesting differences in the associations between media use and avoidance. © Christina Schumann, Waqas Ejaz, Mira Rochyadi-Reetz, Eni Maryani, Anna Agustina.
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Introduction: The worldwide pandemic exacerbated the new role of the media.If previously the discussion was on whether new or traditional media had primacy in popularity and exposure, nowadays the question is whether communicating health issues through social and traditional media leads to understanding their content better and to more trust in both types of media. Objective(s): We set the following objectives for this study:(1) to examine trust in the traditional and new media among university students,(2) according to the level of media trust to compose a psychological portrait, establish the most prevalent coping strategies, and emotional reactions to the pandemic. Method(s): 213 university students (55.9% women, Mage=19 years) were tested from December 2020-March 2021.We examined the attitude towards information on coronavirus presented in themedia and to investigate the level of severity of neurotic states, the level of psychological stress, and basic coping strategies used by respondents. Result(s): showed that although students generally prefer to use Internet news, trust in traditional media increased during the pandemic. Weexamined a general psychological portrait of young people derived from trust in the media. In the group of students who trust media information, we found indifference (39% of respondents) and helplessness (24.4%). In the group convinced that the media are hiding the actual state of affairs, anger prevailed (32.4%). The third group, confident that the media exaggerate everything, experienced indifference and anger (38.5% and 32.7%, respectively). Conclusion(s): We may conclude that desire to learn more accurate and unbiased information firsthand indicates students' attitude towards traditional media as more reliable sources of information.
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Trust in journalism is highly relevant for society. Within the past years, especially during the COVID19-pandemic, trust in journalism became a recurring subject of public debate in Germany: Journalism is often vilified as 'lying press' and the legitimacy of traditional media is increasingly questioned. While in Germany, unlike other countries, we do not see a crisis in media trust, there nonetheless is a certain share of the population being skeptical towards traditional journalism. News outlets therefore need to ask themselves how to win back these sections of their audience and strengthen trust in their work. So far, research on media trust has largely focused on the audience - the journalistic perspective has hardly been examined. By conducting 29 interviews with German journalists, this paper aims to analyze which strategies news outlets pursue to cultivate trust in their work. Three main approaches to trust-building can be identified: The quality oriented, the audience engagers and the transparent. The results enable us to get a clearer overview on how news outlets try to regain and build their audience's trust - which presents starting points for both journalism practice and research.
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this paper analyses the complex relationship between digital practices, communicative codes and social inequalities in the period of the pandemic in Italy, through the analysis of data collected from a broader research project based on a web survey administered to 13,473 Italians. The study examined the use of social media by the respondents to acquire information on the Covid 19 emergency situation. After having carried out a theoretical overview, making reference to the perspective of Mannheim-above all in the direction developed by Bernstein-multiple regression models were constructed;these were aimed at identifying possible relationships between aspects related to the use of social media as an information source and the degree of trust in the information conveyed, and the socio-cultural and occupational conditions of the respondents. The main results showed that disadvantaged groups are more inclined than other groups to find and trust information on social media, as this channel responds to the horizontal mode of communication that is more consistent with the specific code they possess. © 2022, Padova University Press. All rights reserved.
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Previous literature gave considerable attention to antecedents of health-risk information seeking, but few elaborated on its cognitive and affective outcomes, and how individual differences may influence this link. Based on a survey (N = 1743) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we seek to interpret the influence of health-risk information seeking on media trust and emotions, and how methods of information processing moderate this link. Results demonstrated that COVID-19-related information seeking from the media decreased the belief that media distort reality, which in turn decreased fear;and increased the belief that media provide validity cues, which further increased calmness. The negative relationship between information seeking and the belief that media distort reality was stronger when heuristic processing was high, while the positive association between information seeking and the belief that media provide validity cues was strong only when systematic processing was low. Results contributed to information seeking studies by identifying the cognitive and affective outcomes of information seeking, and also lent insights to health-risk communication studies by showing how information seeking would increase media trust and positive emotions, and the moderating effect of information processing methods on media effects.
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This paper presents a simple formal theoretical model to explain why citizens in authoritarian regimes trust the illiberal official media more than the commercial media. Media trust is defined as changes in the citizen’s belief based on good or bad news from the media. Using this definition, the model evaluates the independent and interaction effect of media bias, censorship, media quality, the citizen’s prior belief of the situation, and the citizen’s ideology on media trust. The findings reconcile some controversies in the literature, and, more importantly, reveal new and subtle explanations the literature did not identify and probably needs to pay attention to.
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Fake news is not a new phenomenon and has been an ever-growing threat to many democracies across the globe, especially in India. This paper is an attempt to understand the growing mistrust on media among Indians during covid 19 pandemic. The health crises that emerged during the pandemic jolted many institutions including the fourth pillar of democracy, media. The study has attempted a comprehensive systematic literature review of the growing mistrust around media and tried to assess the various factors that were involved leading to mistrust. The study done during the year 2020 employed a survey and an online focus group discussion to assess the output. The results revealed that misinformation was at its peak during Covid lockdown and a large number of people shared fake posts on social media platforms, thinking it to be true. © 2022.
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How citizens perceive social crises is heavily influenced by the information sources they use and their individual characteristics. These strongly impact how the information received is processed and interpreted. This should also be true in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic that started to shake up the world in early 2020. Based on recent research in political communication, we hypothesize that institutional trust in media, politics, and science, as well as right-wing populist attitudes, should influence how people think about this crisis, which was managed by politics based on scientific expertise and covered intensively by the media. Therefore, this paper asks how the use of different information sources, the trust in these sources, and right-wing populist attitudes influenced the perception of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic during the first phase of the first lockdown in Germany. It draws on data from a quantitative online quota-survey of German citizens and concludes on the basis of segmentation analysis, first, that even in the early days of the pandemic, sizeable segments of the population were either skeptical or completely denied the risks of the pandemic, questioned the scientific consensus around it and rejected mitigating measures. Second, besides right-wing populist attitudes and several other factors, the segments significantly differed in their degree of trust in traditional media, politics, and science as sources of information. We discuss the results in light of the necessity to build, preserve, and restore trust in media, science, and politics as a prerequisite for crisis prevention, communication, and management.