What do we believe in? Rumors and processing strategies during the COVID-19 outbreak in China

Zou, Wenxue; Tang, Lu

doi:10.1177/0963662520979459

Cited by 43 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…They primarily use heuristic processing to evaluate the credibility of the COVID-19 related information they receive by checking the sources' credibility and deciding if the information is carried in multiple channels. This echoes the findings of a similar study in China (28). Such strategies allow them to make quick decisions about the validity of a piece of information.…”

Section: Evaluation Of Information About Covid-19supporting

confidence: 80%

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Middle-Aged and Older African Americans' Information Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Interview Study

Tang

York

Zou

2021

Front. Public Health

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African Americans in the United States have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in infection and mortality rates. This study examined how middle-aged and older African American individuals accessed and evaluated the information about COVID-19. Semi-structured interviews with 20 individuals (age: 41–72) were conducted during the first stay-at-home advisory period in late March and early April 2020. The phronetic iterative approach was used for data analysis. We found that these individuals primarily relied on information scanning based on their routine media consumption to acquire information about COVID-19 and seldom actively searched for information outside of their regular media use. Individuals used several strategies to assess the quality of the information they received, including checking source credibility, comparing multiple sources, fact-checking, and praying. These findings could inform media and governmental agencies' future health communication efforts to disseminate information about the COVID-19 pandemic and future infectious disease outbreaks among the African American communities.

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Section: Evaluation Of Information About Covid-19supporting

confidence: 80%

“…Additional questions were asked, but answers to these questions were not reported in this article. These questions were adapted based on Tang and Zou (18) and Zou and Tang (28).…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Middle-Aged and Older African Americans' Information Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Interview Study

Tang

York

Zou

2021

Front. Public Health

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“…Since the emergence of COVID-19 early in 2020, public communication worldwide has been inundated with messages about infection and transmission risks, as well as preventive measures like social distancing, handwashing, and sanitation, or wearing a face mask (Zou and Tang, 2021). Among the general public, children have also been receiving these messages (Kayemba et al, 2020; Mukherjee, 2020; Soma, 2020), which they are expected to handle both cognitively and emotionally (Valadez et al, 2020) and to commit to pertinent prevention practices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s conceptions of coronavirus

2021

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The present study aimed to examine children’s conceptions of coronavirus as denoted in their verbal descriptions and drawings and whether these vary as a function of children’s age and the mode of expression. Data were collected in Greece during spring 2020 and 344 children aged 4 to 10 years were first asked to verbally describe coronavirus and then to produce a drawing of it. Content analysis of data revealed the following main themes: (a) Coronavirus, (b) Medical, (c) Psychological, and (d) Social. Results showed that children from an early age present a remarkable level of understanding of coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease as a multidimensional construct, which can be designated not only through characteristics of the Sars-Cov-2 but also through its medical, social, and psychological consequences on people’s lives. Moreover, children were found to emphasize different aspects of this construct depending on their age and the mode of expression.

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“…The official intervention action require sufficient evidence to support and carry out relevant investigations, which leads to the higher cost of its transmission than that of online rumors, and the time of intervention lags behind that of online rumors ( Zou and Tang, 2020 ). However, the lag time is the key factor affecting the dynamic conversion efficiency of online rumors ( Tian & Ding, 2019 ; Jung et al., 2020 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A rumor reversal model of online health information during the Covid-19 epidemic

Wang

et al. 2021

Information Processing & Management

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The development of the Internet and social media has expanded the speed and scope of information dissemination, but not all widely disseminated information is true. Especially during the public health emergencies, the endogenous health information demand generated by the lack of scientific knowledge of health information among online users stimulates the dissemination of health information by mass media while providing opportunities for rumor mongers to publish and spread online rumors. Invalid scientific knowledge and rumors will have a serious negative impact and disrupt social order during epidemic outbreaks such as COVID-19. Therefore, it is extremely important to construct an effective online rumor reversal model. The purpose of this study is to build an online rumor reversal model to control the spread of online rumors and reduce their negative impact. From the perspective of internal and external factors, based on the SIR model, this study constructed a G-SCNDR online rumor reversal model by adopting scientific knowledge level theory and an external online rumor control strategy. In this study, the G-SCNDR model is simulated, and a sensitivity analysis of the important parameters of the model is performed. The reversal efficiency of the G-SCNDR model can be improved by properly adopting the isolation-conversion strategy as the external control approach to online rumors with improving the popularization rate of the level of users' scientific knowledge and accelerating the transformation efficiency of official nodes. This study can help provide a better understanding of the process of online rumor spreading and reversing, as well as offering ceritain guidance and countermeasures for online rumor control during public health emergencies.

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What do we believe in? Rumors and processing strategies during the COVID-19 outbreak in China

Cited by 43 publications

References 25 publications

Middle-Aged and Older African Americans' Information Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Interview Study

Middle-Aged and Older African Americans' Information Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Interview Study

Children’s conceptions of coronavirus

A rumor reversal model of online health information during the Covid-19 epidemic

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