Maybe you heard the story last week about how cell phones are making horns grow on people's heads. Take a minute to watch this short video of the morning crew from ABC news discussing it. The link is captioned, "Screen time found to cause head horns" In this video, you'll notice that the journalist announces, "New research shows that constantly looking down at your screen could give you so-called 'head horns'" .
And here's another video that recycles the same material along with extra commentary under the title, "Tech neck causing skull horns"
There's so much to unpack about this story. If you read beyond the first journalists' coverage, you'll find some great analyses of this study and the journalism around it. Turns out, the study itself had problems, and the journalistic coverage didn't help.
Take a moment to read one of these two critiques of the "head horns" moment:
Smartphones aren't making millenials grow horns. Here's how to spot a bad study. or Hold the phone: Are you really going to grow a horn from slouching over your phone?
Use the information in the two critical stories to research the following questions.
First, there are issues related to the "journal to journalism" cycle (Chapter 1),
a) The original journalist changed the name of the protuberances to "horns." Every journalist thereafter copied this nickname in their own reporting. What were they originally called? Why do you think the journalist changed their name?
b) In Chapter 1, you learn that journalists don't always pick the most important studies to summarize. Why do you think journalists picked this particular story? Do you think the study is important?
Second, there are problems with the study itself, which many journalists did not detect--at least at first.
c) One criticism with the study concerns its sample. What are the criticisms raised about this study's sample of 1200 x-rays?
d) Another criticism has to do with the researcher's potential conflicts of interest (CoIs). What were these, and why are CoIs a potential problem in scientific research and publication?
e) Another criticism has to do with the proposed link between cell phone use and the "horns." In order to establish a link between having these protuberances and screen time, the scientists would have had to measure both variables and compute the correlation. Did the researchers do this?
f) Finally, many of the news headlines used causal verbs ("Screen time found to cause head horns"). Even the scientists overclaimed here when they were interviewed by the press. What kind of study would a researcher have to do in order to establish such a causal link?
g) Are there any additional problems you discovered?
The news cycle around the head horns study illustrates the benefit of cross-reading and triangulating. If you come across a journalist's story that's just too weird to be true, read about the same topic on other sources, or on snopes.com.
