Infodemia e os seus reflexos na saúde mental de estudantes universitários

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Caetano, Maria José Pereira
• Orientador(a): Freitas , Marta Helena de
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Católica de Brasília
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa Stricto Sensu em Psicologia
• Departamento: Escola de Saúde e Medicina
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Infodemia; Covid-19; Saúde mental; Alfabetização digital; Socioemocional
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Infodemic; Mental health; Digital literacy; Socioemotional
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA
• Link de acesso: https://bdtd.ucb.br:8443/jspui/handle/tede/3562

In recent years, the infodemic's impact on mental health has gained international attention as a public health concern. The manifestation of this in college students should be brought to light, particularly in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, when an abundance of information and false news also constituted a real pandemic and warranted the attention of the World Health Organization as an issue on par with, if not more so than, the virus that was being contained. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to understand how young university students experienced the covid-19 pandemic, how this affected their mental health, in the context of a Higher Education Institution in the Federal District and how this university has helped the general formation disciplines to either reduce or not address the issue that has been brought up. This approach, which is based on the UNESCO MIL (Mídia and Information Literacy) Cities, aims to comprehend the function that digital information and communication technologies (ICT) play as well as to explain the ways in which media literacy potentializes students' protagonism in the mitigation and management of infodemics. The phenomenological understanding of lived experience by a student in a dialogue with a post-human approach served as the inspiration for this study, which took a transdisciplinary approach spanning the fields of philosophy, education, psychology, and communication. This study, which combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, employs instruments, and mix method techniques in its descriptive-exploratory methodology. With the participation of sixty-two young college students starting at age eighteen in twelve higher education courses, the data set was convenient and aleatory. The study tools of quantitative and qualitative methods enabled the analysis of the phenomenon under investigation in two ways: first, to gather quantifiable and measurable data for statistical analyses; and second, to obtain data with open-ended questions concerning students' lived experiences, expressive responses, and relationships that enabled comprehension of their characteristics and sense during the covid-19 pandemic. With closed-question data, quantitative data analysis and treatment were carried out using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSSPW) software for Windows. Iramuteq software treated the information that was gathered from the opening questions by describing and interpreting them in the context of phenomenology. The results showed that during the pandemic, 95.2% of those surveyed increased their use of social media and cell phones. Furthermore, 64.5% of those surveyed stated that the IES did not provide tools for identifying the issue and how to address it. Analyzing the lesson plans of the general IES curricular units and student perceptions revealed the need to explore more of the fundamental principles of higher education and to promote socioemotional and informational skills consistently in university education. However, there is no solid evidence that the participants' mental health was negatively impacted by their heavy use of social and mobile media during the pandemic. At the same time, it has been demonstrated that an imbalanced utilization of these resources resulted in feelings of anxiety, fear, despair, and panic. Such a discovery could benefit the IES by serving as a focal point for preventative measures that strengthen resilience and support students' mental health.