Information scanning in the COVID-19 pandemic: a test and expansion of the channel complementarity theory using latent class analysis

ABSTRACT

Background

During health crisis, individuals need information to comprehend their circumstances. Channel complementarity theory posits that in meeting their informational needs, people will use different sources in a complementary fashion. This paper puts to test the main tenet of channel complementarity theory by focusing on information scanning (i.e. routine health information exposure) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile.

Method

A survey was conducted among a sample of Chilean adults (N = 2,805). The questionnaire addressed information scanning across six sources (television, radio, internet, social media, family, and friends or coworkers) and explores how socioeconomic and demographic variables, as well as COVID-19 perceived risk related to scanning. Latent class analysis was employed to identify patterns of complementarity across channels.

Results

The analysis yielded a solution of five classes, namely ‘high complementarity and high frequency’ (21%), ‘high complementarity and low frequency’ (34%), ‘high frequency on television and digital media’ (19%), ‘mass media predominant’ (11%), and 'no scanning’ (15%). Educational attainment, age, and COVID-19 perceived risk were associated with scanning.

Conclusions

Television was a central channel for information scanning during the pandemic in Chile and more than half of participants scanned COVID-19 information complementarily. Our findings expand channel complementarity theory to information scanning in a non-US context and provide guidelines for designing communication interventions aiming at informing individuals during a global health crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Access to information; information seeking behavior; multivariate analysis
• COVID-19

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the contribution of Roberto Cantillan in data analysis.

Ethical approval

This work was revised and approved by the Universidad Diego Portales’ ethics committee (project 020-2020) on August 3rd, 2020. All participants in this study provided informed consent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: M. Pena-y-Lillo, data collection: M. Pena-y-Lillo, analysis and interpretation of results: M. Pena-y-Lillo; draft manuscript preparation: M. Pena-y-Lillo & L. Mohammadi. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

Data from this study are available in the public repository Figshare https://figshare.com/s/32c485e27a8ef14bb7b1.

Notes

1 Dataset available at http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14885154

2 We discarded using other approaches such as multiple imputation because the purpose of the study was precisely to explore the patterns that emerged when looking at the six scanning variables together. Also, statistical power was not hindered by this choice. Furthermore, listwise deletion is a common approach in published LCA studies (see – [52,53]).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID), grant # ANID-COVID0508.

Notes on contributors

Macarena Pena-y-Lillo

Macarena Peña y Lillo holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently an associate professor at Universidad Diego Portales School of Journalism and director of the Master’s in Communication program. She is a researcher at CICLOS (Center for Research in Communication, Literature and Social Observation).

Leila Mohammadi

Leila Mohammadi holds a Ph.D. in Information and Knowledge Society from the Open University of Catalonia UOC. She has a master’s degree in Social Communication (Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona) and an MBA (Autonomous University of Barcelona). She is lecturer in the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.