Preliminary Findings on Developing a Scale for Credibility Assessment on Interactive Web Platforms

Abstract

ABSTRACT This poster introduces an ongoing project to develop a scale for measuring information credibility on current and newly emerging interactive web platforms. The poster reports on preliminary findings from an initial phase in the project to generate an item pool based on an analysis of existing scales for credibility ( n = 3) and empirical studies in the library and information science literature on web credibility assessments in the social media context ( n = 19). Results show that in most papers analyzed (16 of 19; 84.2%), credibility was conceptualized as a one‐dimensional construct and often measured with only one item (e.g., credible, believable), despite the common view among scholars that credibility is a high‐level, multifaceted concept. The analysis also identified 59 semantically distinct items as an initial pool, which will be validated and tested with empirical data in subsequent project phases.