Sociability and Sense-Making Circles: How Canadian and American Youth Navigate COVID-19-Related Media

• In Event: Toward Responsive Media Pedagogies: Youth Sociopolitical Sense-Making and Platform Politics in Digitally Mediated Worlds

Abstract

The rampant circulation of misinformation about COVID-19 has been dubbed an “infodemic” by the United Nations (Department of Global Communications, 2020). As active media users, young people are regularly confronted with conflicting messages about COVID-19. This paper reports on the results of a study investigating how American and Canadian youth aged 13-18 make sense of these conflicting messages, paying particular attention to the role that relationships play as youth evaluate, share and act on information.

Recent scholarship examining how young people assess information often frames media literacy as a set of individualized cognitive skills (Bulger & Davison, 2018). This scholarship neglects the socially-situated nature of media, yet 76% of American youth get news through social media platforms (Common Sense Media, 2017). Moreover, young people’s informational ecosystems are complex assemblages made up not only of online platforms and social media networks, but also of friends, family members, classmates and teachers. Our study begins from the perspective that relationships are central to young people’s sense-making, providing an expansive view of youth situated within multiple relational bonds.

To provide a nuanced account of how relationships matter, we conducted a survey followed by in-depth interviews. Responses were collected from 397 youth approximately balanced for country, age, gender, ethnicity and region. Respondents answered questions about a) information sought about COVID-19; b) sources; c) nature of communication with others; d) actions taken; and e) demographics. Thirty-five interviewees, drawn from survey respondents, were each interviewed twice. The second interview incorporated an elicitation (Johnson & Weller, 2001) in which participants answered questions about a media artefact they had shared with others.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the study’s results. Survey responses offer a wide-angled view of how youth participated in their information ecosystems, while interviews foreground personal narratives of how youth grappled with significant questions about information’s credibility as well as its implications for their health and the health of their family and friends.

Both sources reveal youth actively working to make sense of COVID-related media, frequently in dialogue with others. Seventy-two percent of survey respondents reported that they used digital platforms several times weekly to learn about the pandemic. Participants used various strategies for determining accuracy, including fact-checking, and also relied on discussion (in-person and digital) to help make sense of competing claims. Youth shared information more often with a circle of family and close friends than with large social networks and were motivated by a desire to inform and demonstrate care for others. In all these actions, parents played a central role. Survey participants noted that parents were their most trusted source of information; interviews revealed that youth received information about COVID-19 spread and prevention from parents, and also engaged in reciprocal dialogue, sharing their own opinions and knowledge.

This research provides a better understanding of the relational ways in which young people interact with COVID-19 information and builds a foundation for developing media pedagogies that are informed by young people’s lived experiences and attentive to their practices of dialogue, connection and collective sense-making.

Authors

• Catherine Burwell, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

• Maren S Aukerman, University of Calgary
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Michael Scott, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

• Michelle L. Bence Mathezer, University of Calgary
  Non-Presenting Author