Sources of Information During a Natural Disaster

Methods

Certain studies suggest that during natural disasters people tend to seek information from traditional mediums like television and radio rather than social media such as where many people tend to get their information from today. It is interesting to make assumptions of the idea that when an issue is serious enough there is a line where the information from friends and family becomes invalid. Many people may take a person’s health advice when the problem isn’t as pressing, but perhaps when the concern grows such as the thought of cancer then perhaps people begin to seek health information from other perhaps more credible sources. The hypothesis being tested will be whether or not younger people tend to be more or less trust worthy of health information from people whom they know such as friends or family depending on what age they are. A null hypothesis would simply state that younger people look toward online sources because it is the environment there are immersed in today and that age has nothing to do with trusting sources. The independent variable for this study will be the age of respondents. The age group of 45+ seems to be a lot larger than any other age group that took part in this survey. The dependent variable in question is that in general, how much someone would trust information about health or medical topics and, even specifically health information from friends or family. The data shows that the extremes of whether or not people would trust information from friends or family in general decrease as opposed to the rise in the middle of options such as “a little” and “some.” The variables of both age and the level of trustworthiness people have about health or medical topics relate over all to the HINTS data s...

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...ho are more trusting again which is either due to the disproportion of data or simply because there is something that happens at that certain age. The results would also be more noteworthy if the amount of younger respondents data had be taken in rather than the majority of older responses. I feel that the data was not as accurate as it could have been had there been more equally distributed data among the different age groups so I don’t feel the results are as conclusive.

Work Cited [MLA]

Burger, Joanna, et al. "Trusted Information Sources Used During And After Superstorm Sandy: TV And Radio Were Used More Often Than Social Media." Journal Of Toxicology & Environmental Health: Part A 76.20 (2013): 1138-1150. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Mar. 2014.

"About HINTS." HINTS:. National Cancer Institute, n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2014. .