Rethinking Misinformation: A Holistic Community Model for Youth Resilience through Socioemotional Learning and Sociocultural Design

Paper Title

Rethinking Misinformation: A Holistic Community Model for Youth Resilience through Socioemotional Learning and Sociocultural Design

Publication Info

• Topic area: Youth resilience to online misinformation through socioemotional and sociocultural frameworks.
• Keywords: misinformation, socioemotional learning, sociocultural design, youth resilience, co-design, digital media literacy, participatory design, epistemic vigilance, community-based approach, HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing digital media literacy approaches focus predominantly on cognitive models, neglecting socioemotional and sociocultural dimensions that influence how misinformation is created, spread, and understood by children.
• Significance: Addressing misinformation among children is critical due to its widespread presence in digital spaces and its potential to harm their emotional and social development.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has emphasized cognitive skills like fact-checking and source evaluation but has overlooked emotional responses, peer pressure, and cultural norms. This study aims to fill this gap by integrating socioemotional learning (SEL) and sociocultural (SC) perspectives into misinformation research.

Solution

• Proposed approach: An integrated community-based framework combining cognitive, SEL, and SC perspectives to support children’s resilience against misinformation.
• Novelty:
  1. Empirical exploration of abductive themes in SEL and SC perspectives on misinformation through co-design workshops.
  2. Conceptual advocacy for integrating SEL and SC dimensions into HCI designs for misinformation resilience.
  3. Development of design recommendations for community-based approaches to misinformation.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted 26 co-design workshops over 2.5 years with 46 children aged 6–11.
  • Used Cooperative Inquiry participatory design methods to explore children’s socioemotional and sociocultural responses to misinformation.
  • Analyzed video data through abductive coding to identify themes related to SEL and SC perspectives.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified six themes: difficulty with empathy, peer pressure, reliance on social media analytics for trust, recognition of hyper-capitalism, influence of cultural beliefs, and tensions with adult authority.
  • Children demonstrated awareness of emotional manipulation, financial incentives, and cultural pressures in misinformation.
• Advantage over baselines: Expanded the scope of misinformation research beyond cognitive models to include SEL and SC dimensions, highlighting the relational and societal factors affecting children’s interactions with misinformation.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Workshops included activities like designing misinformation games, analyzing viral videos, and creating satirical influencer skits.
  • Data collection involved video recordings of group interactions, followed by abductive and axial coding to generate themes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited to 46 children in one geographic location; findings are theoretically generalizable but not statistically representative.
  • Did not collect demographic data on ethnicity/nationality; future studies should explore these factors.
  • Further research needed to co-design community-based approaches involving parents, teachers, and other stakeholders.

Summary

This study highlights the limitations of cognitive-only approaches to misinformation and advocates for integrating socioemotional learning (SEL) and sociocultural (SC) perspectives. Through 26 co-design workshops, children demonstrated nuanced understandings of misinformation, including emotional manipulation, peer pressure, and cultural influences. The findings underscore the need for community-based strategies that combine cognitive, SEL, and SC lenses to build resilience against misinformation. Design recommendations focus on fostering collaborative sense-making, emotional support, and epistemic vigilance in children’s interactions with digital information.