Research

If you’re a journalist, you might feel more comfortable with words than numbers. If you’re reading this, you might also be interested in research, which, more often than not, involves math — usually statistics. One of the more important statistical concepts used in interpreting research is effect size,  a measure of the strength of an association between two variables — say, an intervention to encourage exercise and the study outcome of blood pressure reduction.

Last week, Journalist’s Resource attended Health Journalism 2019, the annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), in Baltimore, Maryland. One of the sessions we attended, titled “Begin Mastering Medical Studies,” offered pointers for deciding which research is worth covering.

Eric Rimm, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wasn’t expecting to become a celebrity/villain overnight.

But you can’t go after french fries and not expect to catch a bit of flak.

Be wary of parachute journalism. And also parachute research.

A new study in the British Medical Journal serves as an example for all journalists who swoop in and out of academic papers without much care.

Many readers of Journalist’s Resource fall into one of two camps: hardworking journalists and hardworking academics. Recently, in hopes of providing an opportunity for the two groups to learn from each other, we posed two questions in our weekly newsletter.

Here at Journalist’s Resource, we’re big fans of research — especially the peer-reviewed kind. We promote academic research as one of journalism’s most important tools for covering public policy and fact-checking claims.

Even before Donald Trump’s election victory took newsrooms nationwide by surprise, audiences criticized journalists as being disconnected from the communities they cover, especially poor and working-class communities.