The effect of the Media on the public perception of research

The media has often been said to distort the public’s view on research. This can be the case but the media can be informative to the general public. Livingstone (1996) stated that on average people spend 25 hours watching television and also read newspapers,magazines and listen to the radio.

The ever-growing media can increase the public interest in areas of research, such as psychology, helping them to grow and improve. This increases funding behind the research possibly because of more government grants or because of other investors. This shows that the media can have an important positive effect on researching.

On the other hand, the media’s control of what the majority of people believe can have negative effects on research by taking the findings out of context. Nelson, Clawley and Oxley (1997) said that the frame in which information is published control and influence opinion by putting importance on certain values, facts and other considerations. This can cause a minor correlation to become a causality and can manipulate the general public’s views on certain issues.

References:

Livingstone, S. (1996) On the continuing problems of media effects research. In J. Curran
and M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass Media and Society. London: Edward Arnold. Second edition.

Nelson, T.E., Clawson, R.A., and Oxley, Z.M. (1997). Media framing of a civil liberties and its effect on tolerance. American Political Science Review, 91, 567-583

The relationship between causality and correlation

Causality is the relationship between a first event which leads up or causes a second event, whereas correlation is a broad term that implies a statistical relationship between two events, where one is not necessarily cause by the other but there is some sort of relationship.

It is possible for causation and correlation to both exist in a study but can causation stand without correlation or vice versa?

Correlation can stand alone with causation, Shakir (2005) noted that there is a correlation between the amount of oxygen in a room and the ability to start a fire in said room, but this is not causation because more than just oxygen is required to start the fire. This shows that correlation can exist without causation. The idea of causation without correlation is much harder to imagine because of the fact that for one event to cause another there would also have to be correlation as there would be a clear statistical relationship between the two variables. This means that causation cannot stand alone from correlation due to the fact that there would be a relationship present.

Shakir S.A.W (2005), Chapter 7. Causality and Correlation in Pharmacovigilance, Stephens’ Detection of New Adverse Drug Reactions Fifth Edition