A case study in scientific misinterpretation From left to right: study, press release, headlinepic.twitter.com/3JMlNqnEKE
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Key points from study: 1. Very limited methodology - it's technically not published as research because it's just a brief online survey 2. Millenials and older drivers use their phones a lot with kids in the car 3. No differences in # of car crashes btwn groups
But, because of a statistically significant increase of 2 points on a 44-point scale, the press release seems to imply that millenials drive more dangerously than older parentspic.twitter.com/VShjwIDQfW
Now, the study notes that you can't really draw this conclusion from the data, in particular because older parents might be more subject to recall bias (basically, not remembering/reporting correctly what they do while driving)pic.twitter.com/UeVKoWKEby
The main point of the study was actually that driving practices may be amenable to intervention regardless of parental age, but that's not headline worthy!pic.twitter.com/QTpvePVgmk
The point here is that the study is pretty boring - parents text, this is bad, very minor variation between age groups but nothing majorpic.twitter.com/ESJTdEhWQL
But the translation at every step highlights the meaningless - but more interesting - finding that millenials are bad because this plays into an ongoing narrative and makes it into a story
And so we get nonsense headlines based of an online survey of 400 parents that the authors acknowledge may not be particularly meaningful
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