Posted by bconrad in 
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There’s an inherent danger in promoting research studies that are not yet peer reviewed.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).
Holland continues:
Our office produces a lot of stories on social science research. We’re very careful to narrowly report the findings and avoid extrapolations or conjecture beyond what the data provides. After the Facebook study’s author, Aryn Karpinski, reviewed the draft of our press release and deemed it accurate, we distributed the story through both Eurekalert and Newswise, two of the largest distributors of research news releases to the media. It was embargoed until April 16 to coincide with Karpinski’s presentation at the educational research conference.
But that weekend, the Sunday Times of London ran an article about the research that carried the following statements:
“Research finds the website [Facebook] is damaging students’ academic performance. … Facebook users … are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research. … The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.”
But that’s not what the study showed. The news media in general got the gist of story wrong, and subsequent stories blindly repeated the incorrect information. Holland notes that the problem boiled down to a fundamental misunderstanding – he calls it ignorance – of correlation and causation.
Karpinski’s study showed that students who described themselves as Facebook users reported studying less and having lower GPAs than students who didn’t use Facebook. The Facebook users also said they believed, in their cases, there was no connection between their poorer academic performance and the social media engine.
So the study simply pointed to an apparent relationship between students’ lower grades and less time spent studying, and their Facebook use. It did not say that latter caused the former. As one writer very nicely explained, “Facebook may be a symptom of a big procrastination habit, not a cause.”
Unfortunately, most of the initial news stories didn’t get that.
Fortunately, Holland notes that some subsequent coverage got was correct, and the Wall Street Journal even blogged about the incident, clearly outlining the caveats for such research and promoting research prior to peer review.
In an age when newsrooms are facing constant scrutiny, and not just because of budget cuts and changing news priorities, it behooves reporters to be extra careful with conveying complex information. The reason: As this case shows, journalists and news outlets are more easily becoming the story simply by being cavalier, careless and ignorant.
