The relationships of information efficacy and media literacy skills to knowledge and self-efficacy for health-related decision making.

Objective: To compare the extent to which information efficacy (confidence for acquiring useful information) and media literacy skills predict knowledge and self-efficacy for preventing or treating the health threat of influenza.

Participants: A random-sample survey of 1,379 residential students enrolled at a northwestern public university was conducted in fall 2009.

Methods: Students accessed an Internet survey through a link provided in an e-mail.

The role of realism, similarity, and expectancies in adolescents' interpretation of abuse-prevention messages.

Scholars continue to identify the conditions under which exposure to alcohol-related messages predict related behaviors and outcomes. To examine this issue further, researchers used an experiment (n = 452) to investigate the role of participants' perceptions of prevention message realism, similarity, identification, and desirability in their expectancies regarding alcohol use and impaired driving. Results of the experiment indicated that exposure to the messages reduced participants' expectancies for drinking and driving and increased their efficacy for avoiding potentially dangerous situations only when the messages activated mediating variables.