Opioid Epidemic News Consumption

In October 2017, the PBS NewsHour team produced a week and a half of opioid-related content, including several online explainers, which presented the opportunity for a natural experiment for the Experiments in Transmedia project.

Knology (formerly New Knowledge Organization Ltd.) conducted a two-wave research study to advance understanding of the youth audience’s knowledge and news consumption on the topic.

The first wave of the study, conducted in September 2017, provides a baseline. The content aired in October 2017, and the second wave of the study, conducted in November 2017, asked a subset of respondents from the first wave to view some of the content to study how their knowledge changed.

Major pre-production findings were:

• We found significant differences between rural, suburban, and urban respondents across nearly all questions;
• 58% of all respondents believed they were knowledgeable about the opioid epidemic;
• The issue is relevant to a majority: 62% of respondents knew someone who had taken a non-prescribed opioid, while more than half knew someone who was or had been addicted to them; and
• The less news respondents got about the epidemic, the more likely they were to consider using medical information sources (e.g. a doctor, WebMD, the CDC) when learning about the problem – and the less likely they were to say they would go to journalistic sources.

Major findings of the post-production study were:

• Perceived relevance and science identity both have a much larger impact than story format on reactions to stories; and
• Perceived relevance has a larger impact on reactions for respondents with a low science identity.