Trust in Social Media Images of Health, 2023

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The data collection consists of transcripts that contain conversation about sensitive experiences and health issues, including reflections on body size and weight, restrictive eating, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, self-harm, suicide, mental illness, pregnancy loss, infertility, sexuality and homophobia. This collection contains 30 transcripts of social media elicitation interviews conducted with young adult social media users. The interviews were semi-structured, covering topics related to participants' everyday use of social media as well as their encounters with wellbeing and health related content on social media specifically. We were open to participants’ own interpretations of what counted as a social media platform and as everyday health and well-being content, meaning that participants defined this in a way that was most relevant to their own lived experience. Interviews therefore referred to a wide variety of health topics that were of personal or general interest to the participant, including (but not limited to) nutrition and diet, skincare, fitness, mental health, sexual health, specific illnesses, public health messaging (Covid-19), vaccination and medical science. The main social media platforms that participants talked about and engaged with in the interview setting were Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, although others were mentioned. Participants often showed the interviewer examples of content on their personal phones, and the interviewer would take photographs of phone screens during the interview. The photographs taken have not been included in the archive for reasons of participant confidentiality. The collection contains the project's Interview Guide, Consent Form and Information Letter, as approved by The Departmental Research Ethics Committee for the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford (ID: C1A-23-09).

The ongoing crisis of trust in specific institutions (government, media, healthcare system) is often blamed for many of the social, cultural and political problems European societies are currently facing. While many researchers are exploring the relations between trust, technology and misinformation, we need to understand how trust is practiced in our everyday, ordinary lives and media practices. Trust And Visuality - Everyday digital practices (TRAVIS) is a research project that explored how people experience, build and express trust in social media images related to wellbeing and health. We chose this focus for three reasons: First, humans experience visual information as more trustworthy than other communicative modes. Second, while trust continues to be crucial for social life, it is significantly complicated by our increasing reliance on online communication, where we have to infer our communication partners and their intentions from their on-screen representations and algorithmic manipulation. And finally, the pandemic showed us that visual digital representations related to our individual (step counts, recovery selfies) and collective (visualisations of infection rates) experiences of health are increasingly central to our lives. This makes every day, visual social media communication of health news and personal health content the perfect case study to understand trust. Thus, TRAVIS investigated how and why people trust some visuals over others, and how content-creators and professionals create trustworthiness with and through digital visual content. Our research was undertaken in four different cultural contexts – Austria, Estonia, Finland and the UK – allowing us to combine perspectives from Nordic, Eastern-European/Post-Soviet, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultures, each with their own traditions and norms of trust as well as significant differences in how much institutions are trusted.