The Role of Website Narratives in Young Professionals’ Critical Online Reasoning

In their professional practice, young professionals use the Internet as a valuable source of research. Especially prospective lawyers, doctors and teachers have a responsibility towards their research behaviors, as their information processing impacts others, which requires critical evaluation and a reflected use of information. Simultaneously, critical reasoning including information evaluation is influenced by external factors. For instance, narrative frames embedded in websites might influence young professionals’ research behavior. This study uses qualitative narrative analysis to provide initial indications to what extent young professionals might be led by narrative frames, and how these might be reflected in their reasoning when solving a research task. The task responses are qualitatively interpreted for individual differences regarding the perception and reflection of narrative frames. Our results indicate that narrative frames in the online sources used by students to solve tasks influenced and led, to varying degrees, students differently. This may be due to individual characteristics of each student. This study aims to contribute to comprehending the role of narratives in graduate students’ information processing and critical online reasoning, and how higher education research can benefit from that.