In Exploring the Impact of Modality on Perceptions of Credibility for Online News Stories, Kiousis attempts to analyze and discuss the effect that modality, or the use of text, graphics, sounds and videos on a communication platform, and how that correlates to to source or message credibility. In trying to do so, Kiousis set up a study that was meant to synthesize the ways in which users perceived the multimedia and how likely they were to trust the source with an increase or decrease in its display. It was important to note in this study that a distinction needed to be made between the availability of this multimedia content and with the extent to which users actually used it. Many users will see this content, such as a video on a news article, but won’t click on it if they intended to just read the reading. This would be an inaccurate way of testing Kiousis’ hypothesis, and was to be avoided in the study.

This study consisted of 64 users from a large Midwestern university, of different races and ethnicities, with the average age of 22 years old. The participants were asked to read an online news story about China winning the 2008 Summer Olympics. Each participant was given a version of the story with or without pictures and videos, creating different levels of modality at random for the users. Afterwards, they were asked a series of questions, depending on what version of the story they had, and had to discuss what parts of the story they interacted with, along with how credible they thought the source was. The findings of this study concluded that the availability of multimedia elements in these online news stories had little effect on the perception of credibility, but that participants who had actually used the elements had a much higher level of perceived credibility than those who did not utilize them. The big takeaway from this study is that the actual usage of the multimedia content is the most significant means of increasing perceived credibility.

This study is not something that I would hold high in its accuracy, as there are many implications also listed in the article that I would agree with to be an issue of correctly identifying the relationship between modality and credibility. For example, the sample population was a group of students all from the same college, so there was no real variety in the participants, even though students tend to be the heaviest users of the internet. I think that it would be more beneficial to expand the age range to older users, ones who may not be as prevalent in the internet society, but do have an interest and concern when it comes to credibility and news.