MEDIA LITERACY
OVERVIEW
In a world increasingly populated with diverse media and messages, media literacy is essential for making informed judgments and decisions. Media literacy interventions are educational programs designed to deter harmful media effects and to harness the potential of the media for positive social change. My work in this area spans the development of field- and web-delivered interventions, evaluation of their long-term effectiveness in behavior change, and conducting a comprehensive meta-analytic review of media literacy interventions. Most recently, I initiated a conceptual framework for social media literacy. Moving beyond mass media-based approaches, the new framework centralizes the dynamic interactions among the self, the media, and the reality on social media. This work was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.