Media Effects Research Lab - Research Archive
Susceptibility to Fake News: How Educated Are You?
Student Researcher(s)
Justin Endlich (B.A. Candidate);
Julie Siegal (B.A. Candidate);
Rachel Halpern (B.A. Candidate);
Faculty Supervisor
This paper was based on a project as part of the "COMM 418: Media Effects: Theory and Research" course.
INTRODUCTION
For our project we chose to analyze the correlation between one’s highest level of education received and their susceptibility to fake news online. As we learned throughout the semester, fake news has been very prominent in social media in the past 8 years as social media platforms allow for all users to express their freedom of speech. We wanted to test how one’s level of education plays a role in whether or not they are less or more susceptible to fake news depending on their education level.
RESEARCH QUESTION / HYPOTHESES
RQ: For those who are exposed to news online, what is the relationship between one’s level of education and their susceptibility to fake news?
H1: Those with higher levels of education will be less susceptible to fake news than those with lower levels of education.
H2: Those who use Twitter more frequently will be less susceptible to fake news.
METHOD
For our project, we chose to create a survey to ask participants questions related to susceptibility to fake news, education level, and frequency of social media use. We recruited participants through convenience sampling and published our survey through Qualtrics. We received 151 responses to our survey in just under 3 weeks with 57% being female and 42% male. All of our questions were measured on a 7-point likert scale to ensure precise and specific answers to analyze in our data analysis.
RESULTS
For hypothesis 1 (H1) which tested the relationship between one’s education level and susceptibility to fake news on social, we found that there was a strong positive correlation present. In Figure 01, the P-value for that one-way ANOVA was .0004 which statistically proves a correlation between the two variables. For hypothesis 2 (H2) which tested the correlation between frequency of twitter use and susceptibility to fake news, we also found a correlation between the two variables. In Figure 03, we see the P-value is .0002 which proves a positive correlation between twitter use and susceptibility. Along with that, we also made a discovery that for High School graduates, as they use twitter more frequently, they have the largest decline in their susceptibility to fake news as shown in Figure 04.
CONCLUSIONS/DISCUSSION
After doing our data analysis, our “story” was completely finished. We sought out to find answers about the correlation between one’s level of education and their susceptibility to fake news online, and that is exactly what we did. All semester we learned about the harms and effects that fake news has on our society, and it’s time to make a change. We believe that our study will provide crucial statistical evidence to show that education plays a huge role in helping people detect fake news more easily on social media. For future research, we could add more participate to this study with an increased age range to help fill any gaps we may have missed during our project. I believe that maybe changing our dependent variable from level of education to income level may also give us some crucial information of how fake news can be stopped.
For more details regarding the study contact
Dr. S. Shyam Sundar by e-mail at sss12@psu.edu or by telephone at (814) 865-2173