Insufficiency and capacity: seeking and processing of risk information about PFAS

Abstract

According to the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model, greater information insufficiency leads to more active information seeking and systematic processing, and these relationships are moderated by perceived information gathering capacity. These moderation effects, however, have only been documented in a few studies. We employ an experimental design to examine these relationships. The research context is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination, an emerging environmental health risk. Based on data collected from 538 U.S. adults, we found that information insufficiency interacted with perceived information gathering capacity to influence systematic processing and information seeking intention. These results suggest that it is important to reduce the entry barrier of risk communication materials related to PFAS by simplifying the language used to explain this topic, as well as to highlight the relevance of PFAS contamination to people’s everyday life.

Keywords:

• Information insufficiency
• perceived information gathering capacity
• systematic processing
• information seeking intention
• RISP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Consistent with past RISP research (Griffin et al. 2008), participants were asked to rate their current knowledge and information sufficiency threshold about PFAS contamination. The detailed prompts are “Now, we would like you to rate your knowledge about PFAS. Please use a scale of zero to 100, where zero means knowing nothing and 100 means knowing everything you could possibly know about this topic. Using this scale, how much do you think you currently know about the risk from PFAS?” and “Think of that scale again. This time, we would like you to estimate how much knowledge you would need to achieve an understanding of the possible risk from PFAS. Of course, you might feel you need the same, more, or possibly even less, information about this topic. Using a scale of 0-100, how much information would be sufficient for you, that is, good enough for your purposes?”

2 Three items for PIGC include: “The message was difficult to read,” “I had difficulty making sense of the message,” and “It took a lot of mental effort on my part to understand how various parts of the message fit together” (α = .92).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the small grant program for graduate student research offered by the Department of Communication, University at Buffalo.