# Presentation: 183549

## Cancer-Focused News Coverage and Information Seeking

- Jeff Niederdeppe, Dominick Frosch
- & Robert Hornik
- Center of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research
- Annenberg School for Communication
- University of Pennsylvania

## The Context

- Shift toward viewing patients as active consumers of health care
- Rapid growth in the availability of health information (e.g., on the Internet)
- To what extent do people react to public information about cancer by seeking additional cancer-related information?

## Prior Research

- Cancer information seeking research has focused primarily on cancer patients
- Studies examining effects of news coverage have found associations between news coverage and preventive health behavior
- Studies have found large impact of high-profile news events (e.g., Katie Couric, Magic Johnson, Ronald and Nancy Reagan)

## Research Questions

- Test relationship between “routine” news coverage and cancer-related information seeking among general population
- Explore two moderating hypotheses
- Cancer experience (personal or close friend or family member)
- Attention to health-related news topics

## Measuring Cancer-Focused News Coverage

- Lexis-Nexis database search for cancer-related articles in the Associated Press
- Calibration sample (June 1–June 7, 2003)
- Coders identified cancer-focused articles from “cancer” as search term
- Kappa = 0.86
-  Validation samples (26 random days, One per week)
- Developed more sophisticated search term to capture only relevant articles

**Notes:**
AP News Coverage is a reasonable proxy for broader media coverage of news topics

## Recall and Precision of Validated Search Term

- Search term *recall* = 0.86, *precision* = 0.79
- Applied search term to HINTS data collection period to identify cancer-focused news articles between October 21, 2002 and April 13, 2003
- Each story was assumed to have a half-life of 1 day (Fan, 2003). Mean = 1.73/day.

**Notes:**
Recall is the percent of all relevant articles identified by hand coding
Precision is the percent of articles captured by the computer that were deemed by human coders as relevant

## Variability in Cancer-Focused News Coverage

## Independent and Dependent Variables

- Merged news coverage data to HINTS by date of interview
- Cancer-focused news coverage in the week preceding the interview
- Cancer-related information seeking
- 5.7% of the sample reported seeking cancer-related information in the past week

## Analytic Approach

- Multivariate logistic regression assessed effect of news coverage on the odds of cancer information seeking in past week
- Interactions to test moderating hypotheses
- Covariates include age, gender, ethnicity, education, Internet access
- Plot model predicted values by IV’s and moderators

## Overall Effects of News Coverage on Info Seeking

- OR = 1.04, p > 0.10

## Moderating Effects of Attention to Health-Related News

- Interaction (p < 0.02)

**Notes:**
Big main effects for personal cancer history (OR = 2.16, p < 0.001) and family/friend cancer history (OR = 1.70, p < 0.001)

Main effect of attention to news media significant (OR = 1.17, p<0.001), and interaction term significant (p<0.02)

## Discussion

- Effects of cancer-focused news coverage appear to extend beyond major news “events”
- Previous research suggests that public health advocates have potential to affect the amount of cancer-focused coverage
- Nevertheless, effects only observed among those who already pay close attention to health-related news coverage
- Those who seek primarily use Internet to do so

## Limitations

- No evidence (yet) that seeking behavior leads to favorable health outcomes among general population
- Relatively small proportion (5.7%) of survey respondents sought information in past week
- Only six months of data collection, which may reduce variability in cancer news coverage
- Effect was observed in spite of these limitations

## Implications and Future Directions

- Potential for widened knowledge gap?
- How to reach those who don’t pay close attention to health-related news coverage?
- Many adults may require active efforts by health advocates to disseminate information relevant to prevention, screening & treatment
- What conditions lead people to seek health information, and how do people make sense of the complex health info environment?