Digital infographics on marine litter: Social representations and science communication

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2018

Authors

Ana Teixeira (Author) Other; Carla Morais (Author) FCUP; Luciano Moreira (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: EDULEARN18

Pages: 6772-6781

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

ISI Web of Science

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00P-N9M

DOI: 10.21125/edulearn.2018.1607

Abstract (EN): Although there is a current well stablished role for infographics in science communication, not a lot of attention has been given to audiences' previous representations regarding topics depicted in infographics, or how these affect the effectiveness of communication. This paper presents preliminary results of a research which aims to clarify the role of social representations on participants' levels of effortful thinking and attitude formation when these are processing persuasive science communication messages via digital infographics, with a focus on marine litter. Participants of the research are undergraduate college students from Arts. Our research falls into three main steps. First, accordingly with the theory of social representations, participants will be investigated about how they are representing the theme of marine litter. Secondly, a redesign of a multimedia infographic about marine litter will take place, to include participants' social representations on the topic. An already published online digital infographic about marine litter developed by a Portuguese newspaper team, will be used as a basis for the redesign process. In a third step, participants will be randomly assigned to one out of two conditions of infographic processing - in the first condition, the infographic used will be the one developed by the newspaper team; in the second condition, the redesigned infographic, which attends to participants' social representations, will be used. Levels of elaboration or effortful thinking of both situations will be measured and compared to best understand if attending to participants' social representations while designing infographics for communicating scientific topics improved the persuasion levels in participants. Data was collected through a questionnaire with three distinct parts; a free association assessment of marine litter and infographics related social representations and a marine litter related knowledge assessment; two attitudinal scales related first with the marine litter topic, and, secondly, with infographics; and, finally, an assessment of participants' sociodemographic information. Results regarding the first step of the research are presented in this article. The social representations of 190 participants regarding "marine litter" and "infographics" brought terms like "pollution", "death" and "plastics"; but this representation didn't include more specific terms like "microplastics" or "litter ingestion". Comparably, the representation of "infographics" seems not to be evenly present in our participants, as 57% of participants affirmed not to know what an infographic was. Nevertheless, in the cases where participants knew what an it was, the representation revolved around terms like "imagetics", "information" and "graphics", which although consistent with the denotative meaning of an infographic, does not tell us much about its connotative social meaning. Expected further results are an increase on participants' elaboration levels when they process the infographic message that will redesigned to attend to their social representations on marine litter, when compared to the situation in which such message was not redesigned. This study is significant for the area of science communication, as it will help to clarify the role of social representations in the construction of scientific messages for non-specialist audiences.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 10