Beyond Personal Experiences: Examining Mediated Vicarious Experiences as an Antecedent of Medical Mistrust

ABSTRACT

African Americans consistently report higher levels of medical mistrust than their White counterparts. As a result, medical mistrust is considered to be a contributor to racial health disparities. Despite calls to address medical mistrust, few studies have explicitly examined it as a phenomenon of interest; those that have, tended to focus on personal experiences while neglecting vicarious experiences. The current study a) explicitly tests the effects of two types of news story content on reported levels of medical mistrust within an African American adult sample and b) examines two widely used medical mistrust measures. Participants (N = 410) were randomly assigned to view a news story based on a 2 (health care, non-health care) x 2 (racial discrimination, nonracial discrimination) experimental design. Results indicated that individually, both health care content and racial discrimination content increased race-based medical mistrust, but had no effect on general medical mistrust. However, when all four conditions were examined, exposure to health-related racial discrimination stories resulted in higher levels of race-based and general medical mistrust than non-health, nonracial discrimination stories. Findings are discussed in terms of the theoretical and practical implications for health communication scholars.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Cabral A. Bigman and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure of potential conflict of interest

This article is based on the dissertation completed by Williamson (2019).

Notes

1. African American is used in this piece to specifically reference this particular group. Black Americans is used in certain places to denote the use in a specific body of literature or story in which Black Americans would include African Americans, as well as other individuals of African descent (i.e., Afro-Caribbean).

2. Story credibility did not vary by condition, F(3, 406) = 2.46, p =.06.

3. News credibility, measured using Flanagin and Metzger (2000) information credibility scale, was also evaluated as a potential covariate. It was ultimately unrelated to medical mistrust and subsequently removed from analyses.