Understanding the Effects of News-Finds-Me Perception on Health Knowledge and Information Seeking During Public Health Crises

ABSTRACT

News-finds-me (NFM) perception is a belief that, in the era of social media, individuals can remain adequately well-informed about current events even if they do not actively seek news. While it has been examined in the context of general and political news, NFM perception has not been explored in the context of other genres of news. Through an online survey involving 1,001 Singaporeans, with the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model, this study examines how NFM perception is related to information seeking and COVID-19 knowledge. An issue-specific NFM perception was also proposed and tested in order to determine whether NFM perception and its associated effects differ when operationalized as general news exposure or issue-specific news relating to COVID-19. The negative relationship between general NFM perception and knowledge and the mediating role of information seeking on social media in this relationship are detected. It is also found that when the NFM perception is issue-specific (i.e. COVID-NFM perception), information insufficiency and intentions of information seeking on social media fully mediated the relationship between NFM perception and knowledge. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Notes

1. An R² value smaller than 19% for a latent variable in SEM is regarded as very weak (Chin, 1988). Therefore, we conducted a power analysis for our models through WebPower (Zhang & Yuan, 2018), an online software designed to facilitate SEM power analysis, using the χ²-based method developed by Satorra and Saris (1985). The results suggest that the models have sufficient statistical power that exceeds 80% except for predicting information insufficiency in the general-NFM Model (78.4%). In disciplines that attempt to predict human behavior, small R-square might occasionally occur (Carter & Marony, 2021). In our case, it implies that there are more factors besides those discussed in this study that have an impact on the outcome variables. While low R-square values could be a concern if one’s goal is to identify the processes/variables that together form and explain information insufficiency, information seeking, and actual knowledge, the purpose of this study lies more in examining whether NFM perception is related to a change in information insufficiency, information seeking, and actual knowledge. Nevertheless, we call for readers’ caution when interpreting the results.

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.