Date of Award
9-4-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Computer Science
First Advisor
Elizabeth Pierce
Abstract
Every day, millions of people visit various social media platforms to post updates on their daily lives, to search for information, and to repost and/or potentially like posts on social media. This has led to scores of pieces of misinformation appearing on these social media posts. While some misinformation can be harmless and disregarded by the general public, there are various subject matters, including medical treatments and diseases, where misinformation on the treatment and other various subjects involving the disease can lead to dire consequences. This research proposes to investigate how social media users vet their data on two different social media platforms. It also investigates if the social media platform impacts the steps that they take to vet their data to be good data or to contain misinformation. This study takes data from a survey that was launched in early February 2023 and ended in late March 2023. The survey asked questions regarding how users vet their celiac disease-related information on Reddit and Facebook The major findings of this study are that the platform does not play a significant role in most of the aspects of a social media platform that has similar features and design layout. The strongest factor in how a user vets their celiac disease-related data is a strong correlation between how long they sought celiac disease-related information on social media and whether they read the complete article when somebody posted a link. During the research on what steps the users take when they identify misinformation, it was found that a majority of users who responded that they seek celiac disease-related information on social media and ask themselves how the information may impact them, it was found that the user’s income and education level did play a statistically significant role in whether or not they had asked a medical professional about celiac disease-related information that they found on social media.
Recommended Citation
Arnold, Phillip, "A Study to Explore How People Evaluate the Quality of Their Medical Information from the Social Media for Celiac Disease" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 1225.
https://research.ualr.edu/etd/1225
