Abstract
The present study investigated the extent to which the text factors of source salience and emphasis on risk might influence readers’ attention to and use of source information when reading single documents to make behavioral decisions on controversial health-related issues. Participants (n = 259), who were attending different bachelor-level professional programs at a university college, generally disregarded source information irrespective of textual manipulations, especially sources cited or embedded within other documents, and mainly relied on their own personal experiences and opinions when making behavioral decisions on the issues. Theoretical as well as educational implications of the findings are discussed.
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Notes
In this article, the term primary sources is not used in the conventional sense, that is, as documents written by persons directly involved in (historical) events, but denotes metadata about a particular document (e.g., about its author or date of publication) that may or may not cite other sources (termed embedded sources in this article) within its boundaries.
All 259 students reported daily use of cell phones. When reporting on their weekly intake of artificial sweeteners, 150 students reported drinking more than .5 l a week and the rest reported drinking 0–.5 l a week. It is thus possible that some participants falling in the latter category may not have consumed any artificial sweeteners at all.
While it might be argued that the attribution task underestimated participants’ sourcing because they assumed it was sufficient to report on only one type of source features (primary or embedded) although they had paid attention to and remembered both types, this seems unlikely because the scores for both primary and embedded source features were very similar on the attribution and the cued recall tasks. That is, if there had been a systematic underestimation of source feature scores on the attribution task because participants were not explicitly asked to provide information about both types of sources on this task, one would have expected considerably lower scores on this task than on the cued recall task. Moreover, the possibility of a systematic underestimation of scores on the attribution task in this study, implies that the “true” scores on this task were likely considerably higher than on the cued recall task, which does not seem to be a reasonable assumption given that the latter not only explicitly asked participants to report everything they remembered about primary as well as embedded sources but also cued their recall of each type of source by explicit mentioning of five distinct source features. Please also see the description of the attribution task in the Method section.
Please note that the fact that students quite seldom referred to document content when asked to justifiy their behavioral decisions does not preclude their prioritizing of content over source information during reading. This is because their references to their own experiences and opinions rather than document content in their justifications may suggest that they regarded those reasons as more important than content, which does not necessarily imply that they disregarded content during reading.
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Bråten, I., Strømsø, H.I. & Andreassen, R. Sourcing in professional education: Do text factors make any difference?. Read Writ 29, 1599–1628 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9611-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9611-y