Statistical Errors in the Media

The media has a tendency, in general, to misinterpret or misrepresent the findings of studies, specifically those relating to health issues. This is probably done, at least in the print media, to attract potential readers, using exaggerated headlines or large text. They are usually able to get away with such tactics because the changes go unnoticed, or most readers don't think too deeply about what they are reading. In any case, it took little time to find five such examples of misinterpreted or misrepresented data in news articles pertaining to health-related issues. Most of the problems with these articles are very subtle, such as misleading headlines or erroneous claims in the first few sentences, but they are still present and should be acknowledged.

The first article, "Marriage not miserable for women," which came from the MSNBC website, starts off by claiming that a study goes against the "belief that marriage harms [a] bride's well-being." The rest of the article, including the study that was previously mentioned, doesn't back up any of these original claims. Instead, it appears as though this thorough study actually only showed that roughly the same percentage of men and women developed certain mental or physical problems that may have resulted from marriage. The article even clearly states that the researchers claim that "it remains to be proven that marriage itself reduces the risk of an emotional disorder," which is almost exactly what the headline and first lines of the article claimed. Statistics are also given throughout the article, stating the percentages of married women who developed various mental illnesses or disorders. These statistics are in direct conflict with the beginning of the article, which tries to claim that married women have no mental problems resulting from marriage. It is obvious that the headline and first few lines of the article, which, on the website, are printed in large bold text, below which are many advertisements followed by the article itself, were meant to catch the reader's attention, by making outrageous claims.

The next article, "Pessimists more prone to post-stroke depression" from HeartCenterOnline.com, seems to put too much significance on the findings of a small study. The beginning of the article claims that stroke survivors who are very pessimistic are almost five times as likely to suffer from post-stroke depression. These claims, though, aren't backed up by much. First of all, the study involved merely 190 people, who all lived in the Netherlands. The next problem with this study is their way of determining if a person has depression. Depression is a psychiatric disorder that includes specific symptoms, such as insomnia and the inability to concentrate. Simply completing questionnaires asking such things as how easily the person can smile is not a way of determining the presence of clinical depression. Thus, the article misrepresented how credible the findings of the study were.

The third article, "Young at high risk of mental illness: report" from The Globe and Mail, is less misrepresentative. The article claims that young Canadians are at a very high risk of developing a mental illness. The study, however, only claims that a large percentage of Canadians who are hospitalized for mental illness are young. These aren't necessarily the same thing, especially if many cases of mental illness, from any age group, go without hospitalization.

"Americans Fooling Themselves about Exercise Habits," from Yahoo! News, uses similar tactics. The article provides no recent statistics concerning the actual percentage of American's who are overweight, and instead references a Surgeon General report from 1996. The poll that is mentioned, however, is very recent, causing a decent amount of space for uncertainty. Also, the article doesn't explain what Americans, according to the poll, considered "getting enough exercise" to imply. The same information from the Surgeon General's 1996 report is also left out of the article.

The final article is "Death, Depression Link Stronger in Men," also from Yahoo! News. This article starts out by claiming that there is a stronger link between depression and death in men than in women. The article never actually states any findings that back this claim up, though. The closest it comes is as follows: "When researchers considered risk factors, such as cardiovascular and cognitive health into their analysis, they found men, and people between 65 and 69 with depression were more than twice as likely to die during the study as those who were not depressed." The article never refers to the study comparing only men and women, regardless of the presence of depression. This would have been the information necessary for the article to back up its original claim.