Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Undergraduate students increasingly turn to social media as sources of news. Concurrently, academic librarians play a major role in helping students identify and appropriately apply news reports to course assignments and projects. Nevertheless, students continue to struggle to discern whether the news they’re reading is credible. As such, academic librarians must further explore the ways in which students evaluate and use social media as a source of news away from over-the-shoulder, professional guidance to determine why students continue to experience problems with differentiating legitimate, social media-based news. This study first uses a qualitative, grounded theory approach to give students the opportunity to describe their struggles in their own words. Accordingly, twenty undergraduate students currently attending a large and notably diverse public university in South Florida are interviewed in a one-on-one, face-to-face setting. In turn, the students’ narratives inform a related future large-scale survey so as to test the resultant grounded theory and thus generalize undergraduate students’ evaluation and use behaviors. Findings can help academic librarians establish and understand the difficulties undergraduate students encounter on their own in deciding whether a news story within social media is reliable and authoritative, and thus further inform library-related instruction.