Seeking and sharing information about the threat of nuclear war

Abstract

The present study contributes to information behavior research by examining how people seek and share information related to the threat of nuclear war. To achieve this, a sample of 1279 posts submitted to Quora—a social Q&A site—were scrutinized by means of qualitative content analysis. The analysis was based on identification of three question types indicative of attempts to seek information and five answer types expressive of information sharing. The findings indicate that the online participants mainly presented opinion questions, while the role of fact questions remained marginal. While sharing threat-related information, the participants primarily offered opinion answers. To a lesser extent, the repertoire of answers also included explanation, prediction, fact, action directive and encouragement answers. The predominance of opinion answers is understandable because there is no recent experience about the use of nuclear weapons against civil targets. Therefore, much of threat-related information shared in online discussion necessarily originates from people’s personal views of what a nuclear war and its effects could be like. The findings highlight that people mainly seek opinions of other people, rather than factual information about the threat of nuclear war.