| Brief Description: |
Respondents were asked about their scanned exposure to information about three cancer prevention and three cancer screening behaviors. These included exercise, fruit and vegetable consumption, weight-loss attempts, colonoscopy, the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test (men only), and mammography (women only).
Questions about scanned exposure were asked immediately after the questions about sought exposure [see information seeking construct] for each behavior (see below). Those who answered yes to hearing or coming across (i.e., scanning for) information about the cancer screening and prevention behaviors in the past 12 months were then asked how many times they scanned for that information from a variety of media, doctors, interpersonal, and other sources. A third question asked about the last time the respondent scanned for information, or the recency of scanning (see below).
For analysis, the questions about scanned exposure from doctors and “other” sources were omitted. For each of the other sources, the number of scanning episodes was coded “0” for not at all, “1” for 1-2 times or “2” for 3 or more times. These measures can be used to create three related scales: any scanning – if a respondent claims to scan from any of the 5 source categories; number of scanned sources – counting the number of the 5 source categories the respondent claims any scanning from; total scanning – a sum of scores on the four specific source items with a range from 0-8. Respondents who answered the question about scanning recency can be classified in a variety of ways: for example as (1) scanned exposure to information in the past seven days, or (0) no scanned exposure for in the past seven days. This information was used to create dichotomous measures of past-week scanned exposure for each of the six cancer prevention and screening behaviors.
Reference: (Kelly, Niederdeppe, Hornik, in press.)
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