SITI Nurharnani Nahar is currently a full-time teaching assistant and part-time Masters student in the Communications and New Media Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The undergraduate modules she has taught include Advertising Strategies, Principles of Visual Communications, Media and Globalization, and Theories of Communications and New Media. Prior to being a teaching assistant, she was working as an Assistant Manager in the marketing department for an SME. She had graduated with honors from the Information and Communications Department in NUS.

Dr. Lim Sun Sun

Youth.sg: Sexual Health Information and the Internet

This study aims to investigate Singaporean youths’ use of the Internet for the discussion and exploration of sexual topics; and examine how youths’ assess the credibility of the online information. There are several justifications for the study. Firstly, the high internet penetration rate of 83% (IDA, 2007); coupled with recent newspaper articles citing sexual-related activities online of Singaporean youths; aged between 15 and 29. Next, with the plethora of information available online today, there are concerns about the credibility of information online (Metzgar, 2007). Therefore, a crucial issue is how Singaporean youths discern between the objective and subjective elements that makes up the believability of the source on the Internet. Lastly, despite the growing body of literature on the Internet and healthcare, there are few empirical studies of youths' Internet use for health information, and even fewer concerning sexuality issues (Gray & Klein, 2006).

In order to fully comprehend human-web interaction, Lim (2002) suggested that the chosen methodology must allow researchers “to chart online actions, understand the cognitive processes guiding these actions and the mental dispositions governing them (p.162)”. With this in mind, the self-confrontation interview is chosen as a research method. The respondents will be given tasks using the Internet. Their actions will be recorded using screen capture software. During replay of the recordings, respondents will be interviewed on their thought processes. This interview will be audio recorded. In a nutshell, applying the Elaboration Likelihood Model as a theoretical framework, this paper will use self-confrontation interviews to examine how online sexuality information are sought and assessed by Singaporean youths between the ages of 17 and 20.

• Youths and New Media
• Religion and the Internet
• Multimodality and Web 2.0

• Siti Nurharnani, N. (July 2007) Youth.sg: Sexual Health Information and elaboration likelihood model - A Pilot. Paper presented at Asian Media Iinformation and Communication 17th Conference, Manila, Philippines.