Current research on credibility often focuses on measuring perceived credibility of certain news sources and the drivers of such public perceptions, using quantitative measures that sometimes over-simplify this complex phenomenon. Only recently has research focused on the nuanced ways people evaluate information credibility within their particular social and cultural contexts. Such investigation necessitates user-focused research that can attend to the situated and human contexts of digital media usage – a task for interpretive methods.

This panel brings together cutting edge research from Global South and Global North contexts to showcase the many advantages of interpretive methods for the study of how people evaluate the credibility of online information. Together, the papers in this panel demonstrate the ability of interpretive methods to tackle two key challenges in studying credibility evaluation. First, more and more digital social communications are taking place in private social media platforms, and restrictions on researcher access to data on these platforms severely limit the applicability of the “big data” approach in this area. Second, interpretive methods are well-positioned to capture the contexts related to credibility evaluation that computational or survey-based methods are ill-equipped to gather.

The four presentations in this panel foreground the meaning-making processes and contextual factors involved in online credibility assessment, exemplifying the strength of interpretive methods for studying digital news and information consumption. We hope they will generate discussion on how to advance research on digital media and misinformation through a user-centered, context-rich approach.