The acquisition of health and science information in the 21^st century

Abstract

The ways that humans acquire information is undergoing a fundamental change comparable to the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press and broadcast systems. Using the literature and a growing body of empirical evidence, we describe a model of information acquisition that specifies the roles of education, salience, subject-matter literacy, and navigation skills in the decision to seek information. We refer to this model as a just-in-time information acquisition system. We focus on the acquisition of health information and science information separately and discuss the similarities and differences. We utilize a national U.S. survey to describe adult information acquisition behaviors empirically.

Keywords:

• Information acquisition
• navigation skills
• salience
• scientific literacy
• structural equation model

Acknowledgments

The conduct of national probability surveys requires the help and support of numerous individuals, organizations, and groups. First, this work would not have been possible without the continuing support of NASA and we are grateful for the support and advice of Kristen Erickson and Jim Greene. Second, quality data collection requires vendors and staff committed the data quality. We acknowledge the contributions of Mike Dennis, Stefan Subius, and Stephanie Jwo from AmeriSpeak, a service of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and Evelyn Ventola and Linda Kimmel at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Finally, we acknowledge our debt to the 2100+ individuals who completed two surveys in 2016 that provide the basis for this analysis.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that they have no financial or other conflicts of interest related to this work.

Data availability statement

All of the data used in this analysis are available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The relevant data have been deposited in the ICPSR. The data from the 2016 U.S. Scientific Literacy Study are available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The data set can be found at https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/129224/version/V1/view

Notes

1 “Global village” (McLuhan 1964), “Information Age” (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998), “Information society” (Masuda 1981), and other labels with an unclear lineage like “Digital Age” have been considered as candidates, but we believe that “Internet Era” better captures the nature of the systemic changes in the acquisition of information.

2 “Just-in-time” originally refers to methods designed by W. E. Deming to improve the quality and efficiency of manufacturing. This use of the term to describe the transformation of information seeking behaviors and technologies is only loosely related to Deming’s work and should not be taken as a direct extension of just-in-time manufacturing methods.

3 While information acquisition fits under the broader umbrella of information behavior, we use “information acquisition” to focus on purposive and incidental processes through which information is acquired, processed, and often incorporated into people’s schemas (e.g., Anderson 1984; Case 2007; Schank and Abelson 1977; Sternberg and Ben-Zeev 2001). Information acquisition highlights the role of the individual. Traditional communication models, mostly based on Shannon (1948), fail to capture the nature of the public, and reduce it to a mere receiver of information (Bucchi 2008). We acknowledge the interesting questions posed by Case and his colleagues (Case et. al. 2005; Narayan, Case, and Edwards 2011) about individuals who do not seek and may overtly avoid information that creates discomfort or stress, but we believe that this kind of information behavior needs to be examined separately from overt information seeking. Our models do incorporate barriers to successful information acquisition due to the absence of navigation skills or subject matter illiteracy.

4 The 2016-SLS Study was supported by a cooperative agreement (NNX16AC66A) between the University of Michigan and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to study the development and distribution of civic scientific literacy in the United States and the factors that contribute to adult scientific understanding. All findings and conclusions are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASA or its staff.

5 At the time of Katz and Lazarsfeld’s original work, radio and newspapers were the dominant media and television was just emerging. Given their argument, we believe that they would have expected individuals to vet information found on the Internet in a same ways that they observed in the late 1940s when they did their fieldwork.

6 Reflecting a message-centric communication model, some analysts have defined salience as the frequency of media coverage of an issue or subject, but this conceptualization is not helpful in understanding the information seeking behaviors of individuals and reflects the communication assumption that a central set of messages define individual interests (Edwards, Mitchell, and Welch 1995; Epstein and Segal 2000).

7 A parallel strand of health communication research has focused on risk perceptions and the communication of risk information about behaviors such as wearing a seat belt in an automobile or smoking (Griffin, Dunwoody, and Neuwirth 1999). Most of this literature is based on a traditional communications model (media, messages, and models) that predates the Internet Era. The integration of these models is an important question that we may turn to in the future, but this analysis focuses primarily on personal and family health experiences and needs.

8 Navigation skills denote a set of skills that are associated with seeking and locating information in modern electronic environments. The measurement of navigation skills is described in Appendix B.

Additional information

Funding

The 2016 U.S. Scientific Literacy Study was supported by a cooperative agreement (NNX16AC66A) between the University of Michigan and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to study the development and distribution of civic scientific literacy in the United States and the factors that contribute to adult scientific understanding. All findings and conclusions are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASA or its staff.