YouthandDigitalMedia-FromCredibilitytoInformationQuality.pdf

Research Publication No. 2012-1

Youth and Digital Media:
From Credibility to Information Quality

Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik and Ashley Lee

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Y o u t h a n d D i g i t a l M e d i a :
F r o m C r e d i b i l i t y t o I n f o r m a t i o n Q u a l i t y

23 Everett Street

Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
[email protected]

http://youthandmedia.org

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S U G G E S T E D C I T A T I O N S

APA
Gasser, U., Cortesi, S., Malik, M., & Lee, A. (2012). Youth and digital media: From credibility to
information quality. Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Retrieved [Month Day, Year] from
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272.

Chicago (Bibliography)
Gasser, Urs, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, and Ashley Lee. “Youth and Digital Media: From
Credibility to Information Quality.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society (2012). Accessed [Month
Day, Year]. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272.

Chicago (Footnote)
Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, and Ashley Lee, “Youth and Digital Media: From
Credibility to Information Quality,” Berkman Center for Internet & Society (2012), accessed on
[Month Day, Year], http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272.

MLA
Gasser, Urs, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, and Ashley Lee. “Youth and Digital Media: From
Credibility to Information Quality.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 2012. Web. [Day Mon.
Year]. .

Bluebook
Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik & Ashley Lee, YOUTH AND DIGITAL MEDIA: FROM
CREDIBILITY TO INFORMATION QUALITY, BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY (2012),
available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272.

AMA
Gasser U, Cortesi S, Malik M, Lee S. Youth and digital media: From credibility to information quality.
Berkman Center for Internet & Society. 2012. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272.
Accessed [Month Day, Year].

Harvard
Gasser, U., Cortesi, S., Malik, M. and Lee, A. (2012) Youth and digital media: From credibility to
information quality, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Available:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272, [[Day Mon Year]].

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K E Y W O R D S

Youth, young people, students, children, adolescents, teenagers, high school, middle school, elementary
school, digital media, new media, Internet, ICT, Web, online, information quality, credibility,
relevance, reliability, trust, truth, authority, veracity, evaluation, information behavior, information-
seeking, information-problem solving, everyday-life information seeking, media literacy, information
literacy, digital literacy, new literacies, content creation, blogging, education, learning, teaching,
instruction.

A B S T R A C T

Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map
and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for
information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation,
levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review
of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality—primarily
works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies—
reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of
contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from
an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop
competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not
appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or
creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License,
with the exception of Table 1, which is © 2003 Springer-Verlag.

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A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

On behalf of the authors, I wish to thank all of our collaborators at the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard University, who have supported this research initiative as part of the Center’s
evolving youth and media project. Special thanks are due to my colleagues and youth and media co-
investigators John Palfrey and danah boyd for encouragement, support, and guidance. Thanks also to
Eszter Hargittai, Miriam Metzger, Denise Agosto, Soo Young Rieh, and all the participants of a
Berkman Center workshop on information quality for reading a draft version of this paper and
providing comments and feedback, as well as for their important work in this field. Further, we are
deeply grateful for the tireless support and outstanding research assistance provided by June Casey
and her team of librarians at the Harvard Law School Library. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the
excellent contributions by our collaborators Nathaniel Levy and Ned Crowley, without whom we
would not have been able to finalize the paper in its current form.

This work builds upon research enabled by generous grants from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Urs Gasser
Principal Investigator

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E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

More than 90% of teens and young adults in the U.S. use the Internet (Pew Internet/Lenhart et al.,
2011), and similar statistics are reported from many European countries (Ofcom, 2011). The
implications of this are profound; a growing body of interdisciplinary research suggests the Internet has
become a key medium for young people who have access to digital technology and the basic skills to
use it. Various studies also suggest that the Internet shapes many aspects of young people’s lives. In
light of this growing importance of the Internet, various stakeholders—including parents, teachers,
technology providers, policy-makers and, in some instances, young people themselves—have engaged
over the past half a decade in a dialog about the risks and opportunities that young internet users
experience online. A significant share of stakeholder writing focused on risky behaviors online,
including contact risks, cyberbullying, and privacy problems (Pew Internet/Lenhart et al., 2011; boyd
& Marwick, 2011; Palfrey, boyd, & Sacco, 2008). Researchers from various disciplines have also
concentrated efforts on these issues, providing a growing body of data on these risk categories and
related economic, social, and legal practices has become available and can be used to inform the public
debate and policy-making.

Other important youth-related policy issues have yet to be explored in greater detail. This highlights
one such underexplored topic: information quality in the youth and digital media context. This paper
is motivated by the observation that the Internet has led to structural changes in the information
environment that affect the quality of information (in this paper, we us the term “information” in the
semantic and pragmatic sense, i.e. information as “meaning” and “effect”). The increased and more
diverse set of “speakers” online, the lack of traditional gatekeepers, the entrance of new intermediaries,
the disappearance or replacement of mechanisms and standards aimed at ensuring certain quality
levels, media convergence, and context shifts make quality judgments about information in the digital
media ecosystem arguably more challenging and corresponding skills even more important. The
relative vulnerability of children given their stage of cognitive development and limited life experience
increases the relevance of the problem. That being said, the ability to adequately deal with the multi-
faceted information quality challenge is not a youth-specific issue that resolves itself once an individual
reaches adulthood. Rather, the relevant skills, or the lack thereof, will significantly shape the ability to
navigate cyberspace throughout a user’s life.

This paper offers a conceptual framework to inform future research initiatives on this topic and serves
as a navigation aid to slowly emerging policy debates. Second, the paper reviews a diverse body of
literature—including disciplines such as information science, library science, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, education, and law—at the intersection of research areas concerning digital media,

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youth, and information quality and cluster key findings onto the framework outlined in the first part of
the paper.

Our approach is novel in two important respects. First, we suggest expanding the currently dominant
theoretical model with its focus on credibility towards a more holistic notion and framework of
information quality. Second, we suggest a stronger process-orientation when exploring information
quality issues by looking at the entire process of youth interaction with information, which today
includes not only the evaluation of a piece of information, but also the search, creation, and
dissemination of information.

In to be able to draw upon research from various disciplines, a common referent for categorizing
studies that might subscribe to different disciplinary norms had to be established as part of our
framework. We developed a tentative taxonomy with four basic clusters that approach information
quality from different perspectives:

• The ethnographic perspective defines information quality as that which makes young
information seekers choose one piece of information over another.

• The adult-normative perspective defines information quality and young users’ recognition of it
in terms of adult expectations and norms.

• The systematic perspective defines information quality through abstract reflection rather than
empirical investigation.

• The prescriptive perspective defines information quality by how much the datum improves the
lives of users, whether young or adult.

Using this taxonomy, we have reviewed studies in English that discuss digital media, youth (which we
limit to individuals up to 18 years of age, i.e., legal minors under U.S. law), and information quality,
with a primary focus on works from library and information science, sociology, and education,
complemented by a review of ethnographic studies and research in the field of “new literacies.” The
literature has been screened and organized along several interrelated, but not necessarily sequential,
phases of youth interaction with information: determining information needs, searching for
information, evaluating information, adapting and applying information, creating new information,
and disseminating information.

In to gain a deeper understanding of how youth determine information quality on the Internet, it
is important to take into account the different contexts in which they engage with information online.
For the purpose of this paper, we differentiate among three such contexts:

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• The academic context, a set of patterns associated with school and homework;
• The personal context, a set of patterns associated with time alone
• The social context, a set of patterns associated with places and spaces of socializing and peer

interaction.

Although it is analytically useful to parse out these contexts, they are in reality not mutually exclusive
and may overlap in many cases. Our paper surveys practices in all three contexts, but our ultimate area
of interest is the academic context.

The literature review offers an overview of the current state of research on information quality in the
youth and digital media context. That being said, the individual findings highlighted in this paper need
to be read in the specific methodological context of each scholarly contribution we have reviewed.
More often than not, the findings summarized in this literature review are based on small sample sizes
and therefore cannot be (over-)generalized. Nonetheless, the numerous studies we have summarized
provide at least an early approximation of—and in the case of some recent studies even a proxy for—
youths’ information quality experience online. With these important caveats in mind, we present the
following findings from research, which outline some of the key issues covered in the paper. The
findings are roughly clustered into three main categories: search, evaluation, and creation and
dissemination.

Our review of literature on how youth search for information—particularly in the academic context—
reveals a number of interesting insights and issues for further consideration, including the following:

• Several studies suggest that information-seeking activities often span both online and offline
media (including human resources), that online and traditional sources do not necessarily
present an either/or situation for youth, but that youth might use different information sources
for varying purposes.

• Research findings on youths’ search behavior reflect the advances in online information
retrieval systems over time. One early study found that young users often tried to use keywords
to guess at website URLs, but more recent research showed young people ubiquitously using
search engines. Studies suggest that youth generally feel positively about their experience with
search tools. Nevertheless, research also suggests varying degrees of fluency with the full
functionality of search engines.

• Exploratory studies suggest that younger users in particular prefer search results with clear
reference to their topic, for instance in terms of keywords, while the context is of secondary
importance to them. When searching through websites, younger users pay much attention to

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visual elements, including the quality of the graphics and multi-media. Research also suggests
that youth prefer sites with large quantities of information.

• Our review of literature has revealed relatively little on how young users search for visual and
interactive content, including videos—an area of growing importance with YouTube ranking
among the most frequently-used search engines.

• In addition to the importance of search engines, ethnographic studies highlight the importance
of “fortuitous searching”, a form of search involving browsing from link to link in an undirected
manner—particularly where search in the personal context is concerned.

• According to multiple studies, the termination of the search process depends not only on the
finding of satisfactory information, but also on factors such as motivation, boredom, time limit,
and information overload.

• Information-seeking behavior shapes and is shaped by a set of contextual and demographic
variables. Studies suggest that variables include not only the purpose of search, but also gender
(boys and girls appear to employ different search and navigation strategies), socio-economic
status, networks of friends, and to some extent age, race and ethnicity (for instance regarding
information needs). However, many of these variables have not yet been fully explored.

• Key challenges are information overload, distraction, and complexity of information. These are
challenges not only recognized by adults as facing youth, but also by youth through vocalizing
their frustrations.

The second cluster of literature we reviewed looks at the phenomenon of information evaluation by
exploring how youth make the decision about whether to use a given piece of information towards the
purpose that motivated the search. We surveyed both research examining “relevance judgments” as
well as “credibility judgments” and identified some overall patterns. In this thematic context, we
interpret quality criteria as aspects of information quality, which deepen our understanding of how
youth evaluate information online.

• At a basic level, various studies suggest that topicality is among the first evaluation criteria for
youth and adults alike.

• Research suggests that youth use indirect cues and heuristics to judge the quality of websites.
One study, for instance, reports that students filter out websites with pornographic content,
websites with content and spelling errors, and websites lacking a bibliography. Distrust was
also reported for .com sites, with a preference for .gov and .edu sites. A proposed theory about
youth heuristics associated with digital media leads to a list of quality criteria that includes
utility, importance, relevance, believability, popularity, etc.

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• Perhaps the most important cue for youth—both in the search context as well as with respect to
the evaluation of sites—is that of visual and interactive elements, as a number of studies
indicate. Importantly, there is also some evidence that youth do see graphics and multimedia
not just as indicators of overall quality, but also as information objects which are open to
quality judgments.

• As in the search context, evaluation depends on a number of variables. Studies suggest that
evaluation patterns are primarily shaped by the purpose and motivation of a search, with
academic purpose and personal or social purpose as the two main values of the variable.

• Research suggests that gender affects evaluation. One study, for instance, suggests that male
high school students seem to evaluate the credibility of websites more positively than their
female peers do. Another study suggests that participants with high feminine-normative
characteristics place more importance on the quantity and quality of visual designs than their
female peers with high masculine-normative characteristics do.

• Social and cognitive development, which is usually a function of age, is among the most
important variables shaping the ways in which youth perform evaluations. For instance, studies
indicate that users’ ability to articulate quality criteria, for instance, differs among different age
groups. Another study suggests that the skepticism about certain types of information found on
the Internet (e.g. health information) decreases, as youth gets older. Though further research is
warranted, some studies document the influence of socio-economic status on evaluation as well
as the relevance of variables such as race and ethnicity, peer influence, and individual
preferences.

• Problems in this area are mostly concerns adults have for youth, especially that youth do not
evaluate quality according to the established adult-normative criteria emphasizing credibility,
accuracy, and authority. Another concern is that youth do not distinguish sufficiently between
commercial and non-commercial content.

The third cluster of literature considered in this paper concerns youths’ information creation and
dissemination practices. Youths’ creative activities are an important dimension of their interaction with
information, which in turn can be expected to shape how they search for and evaluate information.
Some of the key considerations include:

• A review of creative content categories such as social networking services, wikis, personal
websites, blogs, self-authored content sharing, games, etc., suggests that a significant share of
content creation happens within the personal and social contexts of a young person’s life.

• Research shows that youth may acquire a number of skills as they create and disseminate
content on the Internet. Broadly speaking, such practices allow youth to develop better skills in

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navigating the information environment and making judgments about the quality of
information. In addition to the acquisition of digital fluency and technical skills, a growing
body of literature further suggests that online spaces help youth develop language and writing
skills, as well as social and collaborative skills.

• Norms exists for youth’s information creation and dissemination activities. Such norms—which
often take the form of expectations and behavior patterns —include peer-based reciprocity,
practices and codes of conduct around “beta-reading,” feedback and editing, and interest-
directed practice.

• Though content creation and dissemination practices from the personal and social contexts are
significant for the academic context because they relate to information quality issues, the
practices and norms that youth form around their content creation activities in the
personal/social context may frequently clash with classroom norms and expectations. This
complicates hopes of straightforward “skill transfer,” but leaves open the possibility that
engagement with the entire culture of content creation and dissemination can bring skills into
the classroom context in a way that a decontextualized approach to and understanding of
youth skills may fail to do.

The fourth and last cluster of literature surveyed in the paper explores how youth acquire behaviors
concerning search, evaluation, and creation of information. This section of the paper departs from
traditional literature review conventions and adopts a discussion format in to put the mostly
small-scale intervention studies in dialog with the literature reviewed in the previous sections and the
information quality framework developed in the first part of the paper. High-level insights gained from
the engagement with selected literature include the following, including the identification of
knowledge gaps:

• Youth acquire search, evaluation, and creation behaviors in personal, social and academic
contexts. Ethnographic studies demonstrate that youth learn from engaging with games,
creative activities, and virtual communities in personal and social contexts. These shape young
users’ social experience of the Internet as well as their notions of information quality.

• There is relatively little work examining how learning around search and evaluation works in
the personal context. One ethnographic study points to the importance of learning through trial
and error and piecewise exploration, such as by refining search query terms after getting
confused by initial research and by cross-referencing offline and online information.

• In the course of our review, we have not been able to identify research examining parents’ roles
in the development of youths’ search and evaluation skills. Previous research demonstrates the
impact of parental guidance on children’s literacy; it would be interesting to explore whether

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this translates into the digital media space with phenomena such as fan fiction writing and
information exchanges on social networking and online messaging sites.

• Several examples from ethnographic research suggest that virtual communities create norms
for technology use and participation, which in turn shape young users’ social experience of the
Internet and their ideas about information quality.

• Studies suggest that the learning associated with information creation blends the personal and
social contexts more than does the learning associated with information seeking and evaluating.
Also, research suggests that the communities that form around digital media creation are not
invariably mediated through digital media themselves. Settings such as clubhouses, after-school
programs, and community centers provide opportunities for access and peer-based learning.

• In addition to studies examining how youth learn outside of school, academic literature also
documents a series of school-based interventions aimed at improving youths’ search,
evaluation, and creation behavior. Research in this context is largely prescriptive, testing or
seeking to improve youth behavior according to adult-normative standards, and pertains to
media education and educational technology.

• Our review suggests that the majority of interventions regarding information quality tend to
focus on carrying out the search process and aim to help students at this stage, for instance by
providing specific tools for narrowing the search space or teaching students a specific process
model for searching. Alternative approaches such as “minimalist instruction” or teaching “self-
regulatory skills” also exist. The experiences with these interventions vary greatly. The
timeframe for instruction and the degree of teacher involvement are important variables, some
investigators think more important than the content of the actual intervention.

• Classroom interventions that focus on search often convey implicit prescriptions for
evaluation. Much research, however, focuses on evaluation outside of the search process. One
common, but frequently criticized, approach to teaching website evaluation is to prescribe a
fixed set of evaluative criteria (i.e. a checklist). Alternative approaches include fostering critical
thinking and teaching through games.

• Educational programs have emerged with the goal to teach creation and teach through creation.
The Computer Clubhouse Network is likely the largest and best-documented educational
initiative structured around information creation. Ethnographic studies also document efforts
in other after-school programs and learning environments. Several studies discuss the (still
limited) experiences with blogging, wikis, social networking, and the creation of video games in
the academic context.

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The research map on youth, digital media, and information quality offered in this paper sets the stage
for at least two important conversations. First, it highlights specific focus areas and research questions
that are currently underexplored, including

• How increased levels of creative interaction with information shape users’ ideas of information
quality and how they influence search and evaluation behavior.

• How different variables, including socio-economic status, gender, development and
experience, and peer influences, affect the search, evaluation, and creation practices of youth.

• How to leverage youth content creation and dissemination activities effectively from the
personal and social contexts for the academic context, and how to resolve the conflicts of
expectations and norms between these two contexts.

• How to consistently, and systematically test educational interventions that teach young people
how to search and evaluate search results. An effective testing method could be used on
existing educational interventions and to develop new ones.

Perhaps even more important than the new questions the current state of research suggests is the
mandate for a public policy discussion on youth, digital media, and information quality issues. As
young people rely increasingly on the Internet as a source for information, a research-based policy is
imperative.

For example, this paper reviews a body of literature on how young people access health information on
the Internet. As youth turn to online sources for critical decisions about health, educators and policy-
makers must be wary of the risks arising from information quality issues and seize the opportunity to
design accessible online sources that account for youths’ search, evaluation, and dissemination
behaviors.

Educational interventions seeking to increase youth facility with navigating online information stand to
benefit from the information quality framework, as the search, evaluation and creation process will
increasingly come to bear on the modern information economy. As more careers demand immersion in
digital technologies, education and job training must adapt to the new information ecosystem. As civic
engagement, cultural participation and employment increasingly demand immersion in digital
technologies, education must adapt to the new information ecosystem, especially to ensure that
inequalities in support structures and access do not further deprive disadvantaged populations of
opportunities for advancement.

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We wrote this paper to initiate this policy discussion by distilling important findings in the literature
and highlighting areas of future research. We have defined an information quality framework that
emphasizes the imperative of involving in this policy discussion the participation of all …