Health news began to appear a lot. Every year, thousands of articles are published to highlight the latest research on how we should eat, drink, exercise, sleep, and what medications we should or should not take.
The abundance of health news not only results in a flood of information, but often contradicts the news. For example, reports on the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs in the blood (statins) show a link between taking them for longer life, premature aging, reduced risk of stroke, and also increased risk of diabetes. qqcitybet
Every day, reports like these are read and shared by millions of people and have the potential to influence our behavior. But how do we know that the evidence we get from the news is strong enough? In communicating their findings, health writers need to write simply so as not to discourage people from reading. But sometimes the way of writing like that makes the content feel less relevant to them or vice versa.
For our latest research, we wanted to find a way to help authors communicate health research evidence accurately, without compromising readership. To do this, we worked with nine public relations teams, tasked with producing press releases in journal publishing offices, universities and funding organizations, to run a randomized trial of press releases on health.
We focus on press releases because they play an important role in science news. When new research is published, press releases are used to summarize the results of studies deemed to have “news value”. This press release will then be sent to journalists who use the material to write stories.
Previous research has shown that there is a close relationship between the content of press releases and the published news articles – what's more, journalists have very little time, and they are strictly worded, so they can't always produce stories that cover something in depth.
'maybe' and 'perhaps'
The first objective of our study was to improve the congruence between news stories and the underlying evidence by paying attention to wording in press releases. In the group we intervened in during the study, we used frequently used language, such as “cause”, “influences” and “enhancements”, for strong causal evidence from the experiment.
In observational research, cause and effect are difficult to determine because of uncontrolled variables. For example, there is a relationship between ice cream sales and water consumption–not because one causes the other, but because both increase in sunny weather.
So for this type of research, we chose weaker languages, such as “can cause”, and “can influence”, in the release. This distinction is not only easily understood by those familiar with conventions, but is also very meaningful to all readers whether or not they have heard of concepts such as correlation or clinical trials.
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