Dr. Yonaira Rivera Tackling Online Health Misinformation: Developing a Digital Health Literacy Program for Latina Promotoras
Work with a scholar on a hands-on project!
In an era full of health misinformation, accessing and delivering content through trusted sources is instrumental. Promotoras (Latina community health workers) have been successfully used as trusted sources in a myriad of Latinx-based health interventions and may be an effective way to combat health misinformation by disseminating evidence-based content on social media. It is therefore important to provide digital health literacy training to promotoras so they can navigate and educate on social media with confidence. Students working with Dr. Rivera will assist in identifying, adapting, and developing digital health literacy training materials for promotoras in New Brunswick, NJ and Comerío, Puerto Rico. This project will begin in Fall 2024 and continue through Summer 2025.
Dr. Rivera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University’s School of Communication & Information. Dr. Rivera’s scholarship focuses on reducing health inequities and improving the well-being of Latino/a/x communities through health communication initiatives. Her work uses qualitatively-driven, mixed methods and community-based participatory research in English and Spanish. She specifically studies how engagement with health (mis)information on social media can impact health decisions and how to use social media as a tool to communicate with and mobilize communities. Dr. Rivera is an Associate Member of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey’s Cancer Prevention & Control Program and a member of the Rutgers Global Health Institute. Prior to her doctoral work, Dr. Rivera was a community health educator through the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Center for Reducing Cancer Health Disparities. She is a Douglass College alumna (DC’06) and received her Ph.D. in Social & Behavioral Sciences from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and MPH in Behavioral Sciences & Health Education from Emory University.