Developing User Personas to Aid in the Design of a User-Centered Natural Product-Drug Interaction Information Resource for Researchers.

Pharmacokinetic interactions between natural products and conventional drugs can adversely impact patient outcomes. These complex interactions present unique challenges that require clear communication to researchers. We are creating a public information portal to facilitate researchers' access to credible evidence about these interactions. As part of a user-centered design process, three types of intended researchers were surveyed: drug-drug interaction scientists, clinical pharmacists, and drug compendium editors. Of the 23 invited researchers, 17 completed the survey. The researchers suggested a number of specific requirements for a natural product-drug interaction information resource, including specific information about a given interaction, the potential to cause adverse effects, and the clinical importance. Results were used to develop user personas that provided the development team with a concise and memorable way to represent information needs of the three main researcher types and a common basis for communicating the design's rationale.

An Exploration of the Associations of Alcohol-Related Social Media Use and Message Interpretation Outcomes to Problem Drinking Among College Students.

College students' use of digital communication technology has led to a rapid expansion of digital alcohol marketing efforts. Two surveys (total usable n = 637) were conducted to explore college students' experiences with alcohol-related social media, their decision making related to alcohol use, and their problematic drinking behaviors. Study results indicated that students' use of alcohol-related social media predicted their problem drinking behaviors. In addition, students' wishful identification, perceived desirability, perceived similarity, and normative beliefs predicted their expectancies for drinking alcohol. Finally, students' expectancies for drinking alcohol predicted their problematic drinking behaviors.

The Role of Parents' Critical Thinking About Media in Shaping Expectancies, Efficacy and Nutrition Behaviors for Families.

A convenience survey completed online by 137 4-H parents in Washington state explored their orientation toward critical thinking regarding media sources and content and its implications for family dietary behaviors. Parents' critical thinking toward media sources predicted their information efficacy about content. Critical thinking toward media content predicted information efficacy about sources, expectancies for parental mediation, and expectancies for family receptiveness to lower-fat dietary changes. Expectancies for receptiveness to dietary changes and expectancies for parental mediation predicted efficacy for implementing healthy dietary practices; this strongly predicted healthy dietary practices. Media-related critical thinking, therefore, indirectly but consistently affected self-reported family dietary behaviors through its effects on efficacy for managing media and expectancies for the family's receptiveness to healthy dietary changes. The results suggest parents' media literacy skills affect their family's dietary behavior. Health campaigns that help parents interpret and manage the media environment may benefit all family members.

Exploring college students' use of general and alcohol-related social media and their associations with alcohol-related behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: Alcohol marketers have increasingly moved their advertising efforts into digital and social media venues. As a result, the purpose of this study is to investigate associations between students' use of social media, their exposure to alcohol marketing messages through social media, and their alcohol-related beliefs and behaviors. PARTICIPANTS: Public and private university students (N = 637) participated November and December 2011 and April 2012. METHODS: College students completed online surveys to measure their exposure to social and online media generally, as well as their alcohol-related digital media use and alcohol use. RESULTS: Use of social media related to alcohol marketing predicted alcohol consumption and engaging in risky behaviors, whereas the use of social media more generally did not. CONCLUSIONS: Students' use of alcohol-related social media-marketing content associates with their problem drinking. Results have implications for alcohol abuse reduction efforts targeted at college students and suggest the importance of considering social, cultural, and cognitive factors in campaign planning and design.

The relationships of information efficacy and media literacy skills to knowledge and self-efficacy for health-related decision making.

OBJECTIVE: To compare the extent to which information efficacy (confidence for acquiring useful information) and media literacy skills predict knowledge and self-efficacy for preventing or treating the health threat of influenza. PARTICIPANTS: A random-sample survey of 1,379 residential students enrolled at a northwestern public university was conducted in fall 2009. METHODS: Students accessed an Internet survey through a link provided in an e-mail. RESULTS: Students who self-diagnosed correctly demonstrated higher levels of media literacy skills than those who self-diagnosed incorrectly. Among those who self-diagnosed incorrectly, the only predictor of knowledge was accessibility of information sources; low accessibility was associated with reduced knowledge. Information efficacy predicted self-efficacy for both groups. CONCLUSIONS: The results illustrate the limitations of information efficacy in the absence of media literacy skills. To decrease health risks, college health practitioners should promote media literacy while also ensuring easy access to high-quality information.

The role of media literacy in shaping adolescents' understanding of and responses to sexual portrayals in mass media.

This study was a theory-based, pretest-posttest quasi-experiment conducted in the field (N = 922) to determine whether and how a media literacy curriculum addressing sexual portrayals in the media would influence adolescents' decision-making processes regarding sex. Results of the evaluation, based on the Message Interpretation Process Model, indicated that participants who received media literacy training better understood that media influence teens' decision making about sex and were more likely to report that sexual depictions in the media are inaccurate and glamorized. In addition, participants who received media literacy lessons were more likely than were control group participants to believe that other teens practice abstinence and reported a greater ability to resist peer pressure. An interaction effect existed between gender and condition on attitudes toward abstinence, suggesting that the lessons helped girls and boys in somewhat different ways. Overall, the results indicated that media literacy strengthened key aspects of participants' logic-oriented decision-making process.

The role of realism, similarity, and expectancies in adolescents' interpretation of abuse-prevention messages.

Scholars continue to identify the conditions under which exposure to alcohol-related messages predict related behaviors and outcomes. To examine this issue further, researchers used an experiment (n = 452) to investigate the role of participants' perceptions of prevention message realism, similarity, identification, and desirability in their expectancies regarding alcohol use and impaired driving. Results of the experiment indicated that exposure to the messages reduced participants' expectancies for drinking and driving and increased their efficacy for avoiding potentially dangerous situations only when the messages activated mediating variables. No overall difference existed between the treatment groups and the control group without accounting for participants' cognitive and affective reactions to the messages. These results indicate that campaign planners must consider individual differences in audience members' interpretation of messages in order to increase message effectiveness even within seemingly homogeneous target groups.

Effects of a peer-led media literacy curriculum on adolescents' knowledge and attitudes toward sexual behavior and media portrayals of sex.

The United States has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and birth in the Western industrialized world, and research indicates that television and other mass media are important sources of sexual information for young people. The purpose of this study was to determine if a teen-led, media literacy curriculum focused on sexual portrayals in the media would increase adolescents' awareness of media myths concerning sex, decrease the allure of sexualized portrayals, and decrease positive expectancies for sexual activity. A posttest-only quasi-experiment with control groups was conducted at 22 school and community sites in Washington state (N = 532). The intervention, a 5-lesson media literacy curriculum targeted primarily to middle school students, encouraged sexual abstinence because of federal government funding requirements. Adolescents evaluated the program positively, with 85% rating it as better than other sex education programs. Compared to control-group participants, students were less likely to overestimate sexual activity among teens, more likely to think they could delay sexual activity, less likely to expect social benefits from sexual activity, more aware of myths about sex, and less likely to consider sexual media imagery desirable. The results showed that media literacy has promise as part of a sex education program by providing adolescents with a cognitive framework necessary to understand and resist the influence of media on their decision making concerning sex.

A statewide evaluation of the effectiveness of media literacy training to prevent tobacco use among adolescents.

Researchers used a quasi-experiment (N = 723) conducted in the field and using both pretests and posttests to carry out a theory-based evaluation of the effectiveness of a media literacy curriculum implemented in Washington state. Results showed that reflective thinking concerning media message about tobacco increased for all media literacy participants, whether or not they had used tobacco previously. Changes in reflective thinking affected a range of decision-making indicators. Lesson participants who had not used tobacco demonstrated greater change at earlier stages of decision making in ways that suggested a greater understanding of the persuasive techniques used by tobacco manufacturers, on indicators such as perceived realism, desirability, and similarity. Lesson participants who had tried tobacco demonstrated greater change at later stages of decision making on indicators such as perceived peer norms for tobacco use, identification with tobacco-related portrayals, and expectancies for tobacco use. All participants also showed increases in their ability and motivations to resist smoking-related influences. Overall, the results suggest that media literacy has important and somewhat different effects on those who have and those who have not experimented with tobacco use. The results also show the importance of measuring cognitive and affective indicators of decision making that may change gradually as participants gain experience putting lessons learned into action.

Benefits and costs of Channel One in a middle school setting and the role of media-literacy training.

OBJECTIVES: Channel One is a public-affairs program that includes 10 minutes of news and 2 minutes of paid product advertising or public service announcements. Advocates assert that it increases public-affairs knowledge, but critics charge that it garners a captive audience for teen-targeted advertising. This experiment analyzed the differential effects of Channel One depending on whether early-adolescent viewers received a media-literacy lesson in conjunction with viewing the program. Outcomes included perceptions of Channel One news programming, recall of program content and advertising, materialism, and political efficacy. METHODS: Researchers used a posttest-only field experiment (N = 240) of seventh- and eighth-grade students using random assignment to conditions. Conditions included a control group, a group that received a fact-based lesson, and a group that received the same lesson content using a more emotive teaching style. It was expected that the emotion-added lesson condition would be more effective than the logic-only lesson condition because of its motivational component. RESULTS: On average, students remembered more ads from Channel One than news stories. Participants in the control group remembered fewer news stories than did the groups that received the lessons. Students reported having purchased during the preceding 3 months an average of 2.5 items advertised on the program. Both fact-based and affect-added training increased student skepticism toward advertisers. As expected, student liking of the program enhanced their learning from it and was associated with higher levels of political efficacy. Students held misconceptions about the role of their school in the production of Channel One. CONCLUSIONS: The use of Channel One by schools can have benefits, but these come with risk that some may consider unacceptable. On the positive side, student liking of the program was associated with their political efficacy. Although those who responded positively to program content and presentation style learned more from it, they also tended to want things that they saw in the advertisements. The data therefore show that the program can provide some benefits to young adolescents, but the results also provide justification for concerns about the commercialization of the classroom.

Evaluation of an American Legacy Foundation/Washington State Department Of Health Media Literacy Pilot Study.

A pretest-posttest quasi-experiment was used to evaluate a pilot test of a media literacy curriculum implemented during summer 2001 in Washington state. As expected, media literacy training reduced youths' beliefs that most peers use tobacco, increased their understanding of advertising techniques, and increased their levels of efficacy regarding the extent to which they would participate in advocacy and prevention activities. Mixed results were found for skepticism, which appeared to suffer from a ceiling effect, and surprising results were found for desirability, also seemingly an artifact of the measures used. The results indicate that media literacy training combining skill development with a motivational component represents a promising avenue for tobacco use prevention efforts. The study also helps establish some reliable outcome measures for media literacy evaluations, but additional testing should continue to pursue the development of a complete battery of reliable and valid indicators.