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This article approaches collective health information seeking from computational method by investigating patterns of Google Trends data in the United States during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed factors that prompted a community's curiosity, and information that communities were most curious about. The results of our cross-sectional and time-series-based analyses reveal a few salient findings: (1) Republican leaning states searched less frequently, and while states with more cases searched more, partisan lean is a more significant predictor; (2) States with greater level of poverty searched less frequently; (3) Leadership on the national level significantly influenced people's searching behavior; (4) Communities were most interested in "local risk" information as well as quantifiable information. We show in this work that established individual information seeking theoretical predictors (risk) can predict online collective information demand and information seeking subcategories with important contributions from collective conditions (leadership). Health communication practitioners can design health messages and choose media channels more purposefully according to what people are most interested in searching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Styles of consumption indicate social status. This study aims to understand the influence of external constraints on status displays via two consumption styles – cultural omnivorousness and authenticity. Using a large-scale dataset of Yelp restaurant reviews and the 2015 American Community Survey, we find evidence that the ease – travel distance, neighborhood wealth, and the availability of culturally unique and authentic restaurants – with which status can be obtained via a consumption strategy influences preference for that strategy. Though limited to observations at the neighborhood level, our findings provide corroboration for existing theories about 1) individuals' motivations to display cultural omnivorousness and authenticity in online review sites, and 2) the ways that these status displays are motivated by availability. Findings also indicate that while new media increase the access to information about cultural products, status display appears to have adapted to emphasize new scarcities, particularly localized knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health communicators in the United States face substantial challenges in their efforts to increase parent uptake of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine for their children. One major set of challenges involves low levels of trust in medical science behind vaccination safety and effectiveness, pharmaceutical companies who produce these vaccines, and government health agencies who promote vaccination. We conducted a two-wave randomized experiment (N = 1,000 at time 1, t1, N = 803 at time 2, t2) to test whether messages designed to convey the expertise, trustworthiness, or caring/goodwill of a governmental source of information (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) increased perceived source credibility, increased parent intentions to vaccinate their children, and/or reduced vaccine hesitancy. We found no support for any of the study's original, pre-registered hypotheses. However, post-hoc analyses reveal a variety of promising directions for future work on strategic messaging to increase source credibility in the context of vaccine hesitancy. A message designed to convey source expertise produced greater perceived caring/goodwill among parents overall. Furthermore, among parents who were vaccine hesitant at baseline, a message originally designed to convey source expertise produced greater perceived trustworthiness and reduced vaccine hesitancy among this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer information seeking and scanning predict a variety of preventive health behaviors. However, previous work has rarely gauged seeking and scanning of specific cancer screening information. Moreover, colorectal cancer prevalence and mortality rates are higher among black than white Americans and it remains unclear if these groups differ in their cancer screening information acquisition patterns. We surveyed black and white Americans between 45 and 74 years of age to investigate rates, sources, and correlates of colorectal cancer screening (CRCS) information seeking and scanning. Black and white Americans had similar likelihoods of engaging in information seeking and scanning regarding CRCS. However, black Americans reported using significantly more sources for CRCS information seeking and scanning than did white Americans. Both screening test-specific information seeking and scanning are associated with stool-based tests, but only information seeking is associated with flexible sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy. We discuss study implications for reaching out to different racial groups to promote colorectal cancer screening behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though there is growing enthusiasm for computational research methods in the field of communication, research using computational methods is not yet integrated into mainstream communication research. This paper promotes such integration by highlighting niche for computational research within communication – the specialized roles it can play in symbiosis with researchers using other methods in the field. This paper articulates this niche via the computational communication researcher's specific comparative advantages for testing existing communication theory and generating novel communication theoretic ideas. It then proposes four recommendations for performing and evaluating computational communication research to facilitate meeting these objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that fact checking corrections have only a limited impact on the spread of false rumors. However, research has not considered that fact-checking may be socially contingent, meaning there are social contexts in which truth may be more or less preferred. In particular, we argue that strong social connections between fact-checkers and rumor spreaders encourage the latter to prefer sharing accurate information, making them more likely to accept corrections. We test this argument on real corrections made on Twitter between Janurary 2012 and April, 2014. As hypothesized, we find that individuals who follow and are followed by the people who correct them are significantly more likely to accept the correction than individuals confronted by strangers. We then replicate our findings on new data drawn from November 2015 to February, 2016. These findings suggest that the underlying social structure is an important factor in the correction of misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of socio-technical data to predict elections is a growing research area. We argue that election prediction research suffers from under-specified theoretical models that do not properly distinguish between ‘poll-like’ and ‘prediction market-like’ mechanisms understand findings. More specifically, we argue that, in systems with strong norms and reputational feedback mechanisms, individuals have market-like incentives to bias content creation toward candidates they expect will win. We provide evidence for the merits of this approach using the creation of Wikipedia pages for candidates in the 2010 US and UK national legislative elections. We find that Wikipedia editors are more likely to create Wikipedia pages for challengers who have a better chance of defeating their incumbent opponent and that the timing of these page creations coincides with periods when collective expectations for the candidate's success are relatively high. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]