engleski

From quality health information to wiser youth choices: the importance of information literacy in a complex and challenging environment

The youth is considered a vulnerable population as they depend on adult support, given their developmental age. Typically, they live surrounded by adults who are supposed to protect them, having their best interest in mind. As they grow up, young people gradually grow in autonomy and take the responsibility for managing their life matters. Having appropriate and timely information of good quality could help them in making better life choices and sound decisions. Information is important for young people, and it affects the quality of their lives. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that youth information behaviour has been a vibrant research area and that the questions about how the youth acquires, evaluates, and uses information has been drawing a lot of research attention in the last decades. Special attention has been given to health information behaviour as the use of health information may have serious implications on young lives. The acquired information can help but is also potentially dangerous if it is not true, accurate, current, and unbiased. However, the complex information environment offers a vast array of information of which the reliability is difficult to assess. Challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic showed the dramatic scale of the problem. Perhaps the most problematic is the information acquired on social media whose authority is difficult to determine and quality challenging to assess. Yet, much of the youth interaction with information is taking place across social media platforms, putting them at risk of getting lost in the cacophony of user comments. Many studies that were carried out over the last decades show that the youth are not sophisticated information consumers. The digital information environment and the affordances of mobile technology allow speedy searches and encourage rapid evaluation of the credibility of online information. In such circumstances, it is crucial to offer effective information literacy education to teach young people navigate the complex information environment and empower them to be effective information consumers.

children ; adolescents ; youth ; information quality ; credibility judgments ; credibility evaluation ; information literacy

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