It’s almost here!

Earlier this year, I submitted my first first-author publication. It was a course project for Dr. Casey’s ethics and policy course, which I adapted into an extended abstract submission for CSCW 2023. I received very positive reviews, and it was accepted, giving me an excuse to attend the conference and to exercise my poster-making skills.

The idea for this project emerged from course content, mainly the vast amount of tech-related news coverage we engaged with. Combined with previous CSCW scholarship on media coverage and my own personal interest in how the world sees mental health research, I performed a content analysis of 118 news articles from 2018 to 2023, gathered from Google News. I had to read far more than that as I determined what articles fit my inclusion criteria (primarily, that they were actually about some piece of social media mental health research). Through this engagement with articles, I developed a broad array of Things To Pay Attention To, which informed the coding categories I used with the final dataset.

However, in translation from a relatively broad content analysis to an extended abstract, I had to pick which threads to pull on and which to leave alone. My final project for the course was more like 15 pages; the final cut scraped by under the 5 page limit.

It was very important to me to capture as complete a picture of the dataset as possible in the allotted space, which included very carefully selected quotations and related work. I decided to organize the extended abstract loosely around the categories of a research paper – how did news media cover research findings, methodology, and recommendations? I felt these categories (along with a brief touch on what headlines in the corpus looked like) gave a feel for the data that was most appropriate for a research audience. It is important for us to know how the Big Things in our projects (what we found, how we found it, and what we think should be done about it) are translated into news. This content analysis was limited in that I did not read the original papers that the news media was covering. However, as a researcher analyzing the opposite end of the research translation process, I was able to glean a deeply interesting set of findings about how what we as researchers express as the Big Things turn into short articles.

Echoing previous work, my overarching impression was that methodological nuance varied widely. Some articles clearly made an effort to communicate methodological drawbacks; however, many simplified methodological strengths into sentences which amounted to: “This is important and newsworthy because they did Such Good And Scientific Work”. This inevitably leads to polarization, simplification, clickbait, and all sorts of other black-and-white tendencies in news coverage that likely wasn’t there in the original work. One of my favorite quotes that made the final cut was from a UTexas article that summarizes this tendency perfectly: “This study is an important scientific advance because it uses an experiment.”

One of my greatest challenges in this content analysis and subsequent writing was keeping a carefully neutral tone. My personal bias is that I dislike news coverage that claims that “social media is destroying our children”, and that I have a distrust of medicalization and healthism. I also think that nuance is a key component of research ethics. While the categories I used were relatively neutral, composing a story of the paper needed to be, too. I didn’t want to come across like I was demonizing journalists or news publications; I didn’t want to seem like I was talking down or criticizing readers who benefit from short, simple articles. Simplification is accessibility; translation of science to public is a deeply important, fraught, and imperfect process. Previous work in much longer formats have touched on these issues beautifully; one of my favorites is by Smith, Nevarez, and Zhu.

My hope with this extended abstract is to keep up a pattern: we should be studying how news media covers our work. Mental health and social media are two extremely popular areas in both research and society, so studying this as case study of research translation is relevant and vital. My corresponding hope is that people talk to me about this paper, because there are a lot of ideas, questions, and patterns I didn’t have space to include. I’m excited for CSCW 2023, and I hope that I am able to start this conversation standing by my real, printed poster in a conference hall!