Pitt Cyber has nearly 100 affiliate scholars drawn from across the University. Affiliate scholars are Pitt faculty working on cyber-related transdisciplinary research. Every so often we catch up with one of them on the blog to learn more about what they’re working on.
This week, we spoke with Beth Hoffman, Assistant Professor, Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, School for Public Health.
Q: What are you working on that has you excited right now?
I'm working on a couple of projects that have me excited right now. The first is an NIH-funded study led by fellow Pitt Cyber Affiliate Scholar Dr. Jaime Sidani examining nicotine and tobacco misinformation on youth-oriented social media platforms. I'm excited that we have our Youth Collaborative for this project up and running, which allows us to hear directly from young people about the social media platforms they use and their perceptions of the content they see. I'm also excited about a Nielsen Foundation funded project I'm working on in collaboration with the Media Impact Project examining anti-fat bias and weight stigma on scripted television.
Q: As part of your research, you spend a lot of time on community-academic partnerships. How have those partnerships changed your work?
I am so lucky to work with such amazing community partners. I want to particularly highlight CHAMP, a partnership between Pitt, Children's Hospital, and Arsenal Middle School in Lawrenceville. It's so energizing to work with the teachers and students. I'm looking forward this year to build off of our previous health education projects including using TV clips for education around vaping products and teaching students CPR.
Q: You spend a lot of time studying how social media can impact youth in both positive and negative ways. Are there things you think parents should be doing that they don’t currently?
Something I think is really helpful is to talk to young people about media literacy, which is a fancy term for learning how to evaluate what you see in the media. I'm a big fan of what we call the SIFT method, which stands for Stop, Identify the source, Find other coverage, and Trace claims back to the original source. It can be really hard to tell truth from fiction, so it is important to empower young people with skills that can help them to better do this.
Q: What courses are you teaching this year?
In the Fall I'm teaching PUBHLT100: Fundamentals of Public Health (undergraduate) and BCHS2554: Introduction to Community Health (graduate). In the Spring I am teaching PUBHLT0402: Entertainment Media and Health, which is a course I designed that will examine the ways in which popular media (mostly television) can influence perceptions of health and healthcare and health behavior.
Q: What’s a book, podcast, or otherwise that you think of as required reading? (or has changed how you think; or what are you reading now)
This Fall I am having my Introduction to Community Health students read the book American Sirens by Kevin Hazzard, which tells the story of Freedom House. Very few people know that the first paramedics were here in Pittsburgh, a group of Black men from the Hill District. The history of paramedicine in this country has been whitewashed, but this book does an excellent job of telling the story of the extraordinary men and women of Freedom House.