| Popis: |
The Internet allows us more access than ever before to the unadulterated anecdotes and opinions of our fellow laypeople. Our decisions—about health care or parenting, for example—were once based on advice from experts, plus perhaps testimonies from a small pool of friends and family, or a finite number of narratives filtered through the press or television. Now the proliferation of social networking and user-generated content in the age of Web 2.0 puts at our disposal a huge and often unmoderated bank of online material. Google searches in June 2011 for ‘‘health discussion forum’’ and ‘‘mothers discussion forum’’ yielded 310 million and 62 million hits, respectively—and we know that decision makers do access these online resources. What is less clear is whether, why, and exactly how lay narratives from online forums are associated with real-life decisions. In this issue of Medical Decision Making (MDM), Betsch and colleagues report an investigation of how lay narratives are used in decision making about vaccination. Using a fictional disease and vaccine context, a mock Internet bulletin board setup, and an undergraduate sample, the authors varied the relative frequency, emotionality, richness, and correlation with official risk estimates of narratives reporting vaccine adverse events and assessed perceived adverse event risk and vaccine uptake intention. Betsch and others found that a higher frequency of narratives reporting vaccine adverse events increased perceived vaccine risk and decreased vaccine uptake intention, that narrative frequency affected risk perception and uptake intention to a greater extent than did statistical information, and that emotionality in narratives increased risk perception, whereas richness had no impact. |
