Beyond Personal Experiences: Examining Mediated Vicarious Experiences as an Antecedent of Medical Mistrust

Abstract

ABSTRACT African Americans consistently report higher levels of medical mistrust than their White counterparts. As a result, medical mistrust is considered to be a contributor to racial health disparities. Despite calls to address medical mistrust, few studies have explicitly examined it as a phenomenon of interest; those that have, tended to focus on personal experiences while neglecting vicarious experiences. The current study a) explicitly tests the effects of two types of news story content on reported levels of medical mistrust within an African American adult sample and b) examines two widely used medical mistrust measures. Participants (N = 410) were randomly assigned to view a news story based on a 2 (health care, non-health care) x 2 (racial discrimination, nonracial discrimination) experimental design. Results indicated that individually, both health care content and racial discrimination content increased race-based medical mistrust, but had no effect on general medical mistrust. However, when all four conditions were examined, exposure to health-related racial discrimination stories resulted in higher levels of race-based and general medical mistrust than non-health, nonracial discrimination stories. Findings are discussed in terms of the theoretical and practical implications for health communication scholars.