In the United States, the internet is a vital resource for LGBTQ+ youth to meet their sexual and reproductive health information needs, especially those who cannot receive necessary information from family, healthcare providers, and classrooms. In this dissertation, I present three papers that connect content moderation policies and their impacts…

Online resources are becoming increasingly important in undergraduate education and have been associated with a number of advantages and positive outcomes on students' learning experience. However, online resource use by veterinary students for physiology learning remains poorly understood. Thus the present questionnaire-based study aims to…

This study explored university students' information-seeking behaviours related to nutrition. The focus was on cognitive authority, specifically, the trust given to information sources. Research questions encompassed identifying university students' nutrition needs, information sources usage, and the levels of trust in those sources. A…

Emerging pandemics call for unique health communication and education strategies in which public health agencies need to satisfy the public's information needs about possible risks while preventing risk exaggeration and dramatization. As a route to providing a framework for understanding public information behaviors in response to an emerging…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…

This study explored university students' information seeking behaviors related to prescription medication (PM) information. Specifically, it examined the different sources students use for PM information, their use and perceptions of online sources, the types of PM information they seek, their concerns about, and methods they apply to verify the…