Facebook causes slavery, violence and lousy media coverage, a new study released today shows.

There’s an inherent danger in promoting research studies that are not yet peer reviewed. Foremost is that many people, reporters in particular, probably do not fully understand what peer-review technically means. This being the case, Ohio State University recently had to go on the offensive against an avalanche of misinformation reported about a study the university had promoted.

Earle Holland, Ohio State’s assistant vice president for research communications, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review this month, details the situation.

He says:

From the start, we knew that the news release we were distributing had a chance for ample news coverage. After all, it involved the ubiquitous “social media” and student grades, either of which is all-but-guaranteed to garner attention.

What we didn’t figure was how badly most of the conventional news media would muck up the story in the process. Ultimately, the entire episode offers a good lesson in the inherent risks of reporters’ cavalierly covering the social sciences, as well as the risks that young researchers can face in dealing with the news media.

Holland notes the university was upfront about the limitations of the study in question, which showed a correlation between Facebook use and lower student grades. The key point is, of course, that correlation is not the same as causation. Scientists and researchers know this. Reporters do not, and it’s a great source of misinformation (see here and here for examples). Read the rest of this entry »