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College Students' Credibility Judgments in the Information-Seeking Process

Information seeking is an important part of people's everyday lives. To obtain information, people use Web search engines, consult authorities, ask questions of friends, go to libraries, read newspapers, and watch television, among other methods. Through such activities, people continually make judgments about how useful information is to their particular needs, actively construct meaning, and form judgments about the relevance of the information to their goal based on various attributes or criteria. 1 When people assess information, however, they may notice that the characteristics and value of some information are not always consistent. 2 That is, people may find texts that seem to be clearly written but are inaccurate, that are easy to obtain but out-of-date, that are current but not sufficiently comprehensive, and so on. In such cases, how do they make judgments about information? According to Wilson, people tend to ask whether they can believe what the text says or, if not, whether they can at least take it seriously. 3 Wilson thus notes that credibility is a chief aspect of information quality and states that what and who people believe to be credible constitutes the potential pool of " cognitive authorities, " or those that influence people's thoughts because they are perceived as " worthy of belief. " 4 Selecting credible information from among the various available resources is a challenge for anyone. The kinds of challenges may, however, differ for adults and for young people. For instance, adult information seekers are likely to select information when they think it is 5 Young people, on the other hand, often mainly consider whether information is related to the topic and whether it is new, interesting, and convenient, while showing less interest in authority, the readability of the language, and recency. 6 Moreover, most adults possessed knowledge of how to evaluate information in traditional print media before newer digital media, especially the Internet, were introduced. Consequently , they had to learn how to apply the old rules and criteria for evaluating information to the relatively newer digital media. 7 Their experiences differ from those of today's youth, who have used digital media since a very young age. Indeed, survey reports show that 20 percent of college students began using computers between the ages of 5 and 8, and by the time they reached 16–18 years, virtually all of today's college students were using computers. 8 Thus, today's college students …