When Engagement Leads to Action: Understanding the Impact of Cancer (Mis)information among Latino/a Facebook Users

ABSTRACT

Latinos/as – the largest minority group in the U.S. – are avid Facebook users, making this an opportune tool to educate on the uptake of cancer prevention and screening behaviors. However, there is a dearth in scholarship exploring how Latinos/as engage with and act upon health content encountered on social media, which may be influenced by cultural values. This qualitatively-driven, mixed-methods study explores how Latinos/as engage with and act upon cancer prevention and screening information (CPSI) on Facebook. During one-on-one, in-depth interviews, participants (n = 20) logged onto their Facebook account alongside the researcher and discussed cancer-related posts they engaged with during the past 12 months. Interview questions included the reasons for engagement, and whether engagement triggered further action. Interviews were analyzed thematically. In parallel, a content analysis of the CPSI posts identified during the interviews was conducted. The majority of CPSI posts participants engaged with contained food-related content and visual imagery. Engagement was most common when individuals had personal relationships to the poster, when posts included videos/images, and when posts contained content promoting the curative properties of popular Latin American foods. Engagement often led to information-seeking and sharing, discussing content with others, and/or changing health behaviors. Findings highlight the importance of adequately contextualizing how cultural values influence the ways in which Latinos/as engage with and act upon CPSI on Facebook, which may lead individuals to bypass evidence-based procedures. Multi-pronged efforts are necessary to adequately leverage social media to empower Latinos/as to partake in behaviors that effectively reduce cancer health disparities.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Javier de la Maza assisting with content analysis coding; Dr. Asa Oxner for providing interview space; and the transcription services of Dr. Carlos Rodríguez Díaz’s “Sex+ TEAM” at the Center for Evaluation and Sociomedical Research at the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Public Health – Medical Sciences Campus (Ilia Otero Cruz, Ana Ruiz, Gabriel Pastrana, Jafet Sánchez, and Neishka Rodríguez). The main author also thanks Dr. João Carlos Magalhães for his instrumental feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. We would like to highlight that U.S. Latino/a identities are not monolithic, but complex and thus not easily encapsulated in this manuscript. Our work is not intended to be prescriptive of such identities, but a first step in exploring how Latinos/as may engage with and act upon information that is shared on platforms where different identities maybe be sharing content in the same spaces. This work is intended to be generative (not definitive) and to be used as a starting point to explore important within-group differences.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Qualitative Studies in Health and Medicine Dissertation Enhancement Award and by the National Cancer Institute Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities, [Award No. P30CA177558-05S3]. The first author was previously supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Award No. [T32CA009314-36 (2015-2018) and F31CA224615 (2018-2020)]. The content is solely the responsibility of the author(s) and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Cancer Institute.