Essential Guidelines for Journalists to Report Accurately on Research
Reporting accurately on research involving human subjects requires journalists to understand specific details about the samples used in a given study. It is crucial to know, for example, whether researchers used a nationally representative sample. The importance of that does not waver, whether a journalist is covering an opinion poll, reporting on an academic article, or laying out the results of a new clinical trial.
Researchers start designing a study by identifying their intended audience or the specific group within a population they are focusing on. Afterwards, they create a sample that serves the purpose of representing this larger group. When researchers aim to study a group of people across an entire country, they strive to obtain a nationally representative sample. This sample should reflect the target population's key characteristics, such as gender, age, political party affiliation, and household income.
In each research study, arguably the most valuable part is how the data is collected from the public. The time when and place where the research is conducted makes all the difference. For instance, data taken from people within a shopping mall in one region of the U.S. would be vastly different from taking data from various locations across the country. If the field is too narrow, the data would only reflect perspectives from a single region and therefore not be accurate in terms of speaking for the whole population.
Moreover, a nationally representative sample is just one of several sampling methods used in research. These has been particularly useful in fields like public health, criminal justice, education, immigration, politics, and economics, where numerical data is analyzed. For accurate reporting, journalists need to closely examine who is included and excluded in these research samples.
When Doing a Nationwide Study, Representation is More Important Than the Numbers
One might initially assume that the larger the sample, the more accurate the results, but that is not always the case. When doing a nationwide study, the most important aspect to focus on is having a sample that most closely resembles the entire population. Even if a sample size is large, it is not guaranteed that the target population will be accurately represented. Large samples may perform just as badly as small and unrepresentative samples.
However, if the sample is representative, larger samples will still be more helpful as having a larger sample will improve the reliability of the results. In these cases, researchers will have more of an ability to investigate the differences among subgroups of the sampled target population.
Research May Only Be Focusing on the National Level, Not Local
When a nationally representative sample is used, analyses often focus on nationwide findings and will not be indicative of what they would find in people at the local level. Research conducted on the national level will give a useful indication of how things are on average nationwide, but the person reading these findings will likely not be able to apply it to their specific city or region. When these nationwide samples are used, a journalist is more apt to overgeneralize as well.
A lot of the time research findings will apply only to a narrow group of people at the national level who share the same characteristics as the people in the sample. When a journalist wants to determine who a study is designed to represent, they can look at how researchers have defined this target population, including location, demographics, and other characteristics.
Outcomes Should Not Be Overstated
When reporting on research findings, journalists will want to produce widely viewed and well-received articles as usual, but they should still push past the temptation to exaggerate findings to get views or sell a story.
A journalist’s desire to have their articles resonate with a larger audience should not come at the cost of the reader, as that audience should still always receive information that is fully accurate.
If study conclusions or outcomes are overstated, the journalist risks misleading the public. This can potentially lead to them polarizing an emerging or existing debate on important topics such as public health issues.
