Health Misinformation Exposure and Health Disparities: Observations and Opportunities.
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2023-04
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Abstract
The concepts of health misinformation and health disparities have been prominent in public health literature in recent years, in part because of the threat that each notion poses to public health. How exactly are misinformation proliferation and health disparities related, however? What roles might misinformation play in explaining the health disparities that we have documented in the United States and elsewhere? How might we mitigate the effects of misinformation exposure among people facing relatively poor health outcomes? In this review, we address such questions by first defining health disparities and misinformation as concepts and then considering how misinformation exposure might theoretically affect health decision-making and account for disparate health behavior and health outcomes. We alsoassess the potential for misinformation-focused interventions to address health disparities based on available literature and call for future research to address gaps in our current evidence base.
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Southwell, Brian G, Jessica Otero Machuca, Sabrina T Cherry, Melissa Burnside and Nadine J Barrett (2023). Health Misinformation Exposure and Health Disparities: Observations and Opportunities. Annual review of public health, 44(1). pp. 113–130. 10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071321-031118 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/27332.
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Brian Glen Southwell
Dr. Brian Southwell is an adjunct professor with Duke's Department of Medicine and also has worked with the Social Science Research Institute and the Energy Initiative. Southwell directs the Science in the Public Sphere program at RTI International and also is a faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill. He hosts The Measure of Everyday Life, a weekly public radio show, is the author of Social Networks and Popular Understanding of Science and Health (Johns Hopkins University Press), and edited Innovations in Home Energy Use: A Sourcebook (RTI Press) and Misinformation and Mass Audiences (University of Texas Press).
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