Drs. Bowler, Oh, and He awarded 2014 OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science grant

12/12/2013

The iSchool is delighted to congratulate Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty Leanne Bowler, Jung Sun Oh, and Daqing He on receiving a 2014 OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant (LISRG) for their proposal “Teen Health Information Behavior and Social Q&A: A Study to Investigate Teens’ Assessments of the Accuracy, Credibility, and Reliability of Health Information about Eating Disorders in Yahoo! Answers.”

This research project will investigate teens’ perspectives on the accuracy, credibility, and reliability of health information found on Yahoo! Answers a Social Q&A site commonly used by teens. While the use of the Web by teens as a source for health information is growing, there is little evidence to suggest that their ability to critically evaluate such information has improved. This project will contribute to the greater understanding of young people’s health information-seeking behavior and the role that Social Q&A plays in the provision of health information for young people.

In awarding the grant, the review panel noted “The proposal addresses a timely, highly relevant and important topic comparing teen assessment of health information on a Social Q&A site with that of health professionals, yielding some sense of information literacy and overall judgment of online sources.”

Dr. Bowler is an Assistant Professor in the LIS program whose research interests include children and youth information interaction in relation to metacognitive practices and the critical creation and use of information and information technology and the health information behavior of children and youth. Dr. Oh, also an Assistant Professor, researches social information tools, social informatics, information behaviors on the Web, digital libraries and metadata. Associate Professor Daqing He researches information retrieval and interactive retrieval-system design, user-modeling and adaptive Web-search system design and analysis, and computational linguistics and natural-language processing.

The OCLC/ALISE LISRG Program was established to recognize the importance of high quality research within the fields of Library Science and Information Science. From the agency, the “overall goal is to promote independent research, particularly work helping to integrate new technologies that offer innovative approaches, and research that contributes to a better understanding of the information environment and user expectations and behaviors.” Grant awards range up to $15,000 and support one-year research projects. For more information on this program, please visit the OCLC/ALISE LISRG website.

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