Verifying Web-based Information: Detailed accounts of web use in real time

Dr. Overbey has conducted a quantitative and qualitative study of how adult professionals verify web-based information. To date, research on web use consists of descriptive reports and prescriptive approaches. What's missing are descriptive reports that offer potential prescriptive value. This project addresses this gap by way of a survey study and three think-aloud protocols. Survey results show statistical significance in correlations between the kinds of strategies used for verifying web-based information and participants' demographic characteristics. These results provide a theoretical rationale for selecting think-aloud protocol participants. Protocol results show that participants' approaches to verifying web-based information match up with some combination of prescriptive approaches, which demonstrates how and in what contexts these approaches become operational. Finally, data show that participants' information recall as they review web-based information plays a vital role in their ability to make credibility assessments of this information, a finding that illustrates the benefits of studying web use in real time.

David W. Overbey is an Assistant Professor of English at Bellarmine University, U.S.A. His current research interests focus on how digital environments are adapted to social practice. He is also a fiction and screenplay writer, and makes the world's best gourmet pizza in his spare time.