Randomised controlled trial of optimal press release wording on health-related news coverage

• Register: ISRCTN
• Last refreshed on: 27 May 2019
• Main ID: ISRCTN10492618
• Date of registration: 20/08/2015
• Prospective Registration: Yes
• Primary sponsor: Cardiff University
• Public title: Randomised controlled trial of optimal press release wording on health-related news coverage
• Scientific title: A multi-armed randomised controlled trial of modifying causal claims and adding study design information to health-related press releases on news coverage
• Date of first enrolment: 31/08/2015
• Target sample size: 500
• Recruitment status: Completed
• URL: http://isrctn.com/ISRCTN10492618
• Study type: Interventional
• Study design: Interventional multi-centre randomised controlled trial (Prevention)
• Phase: Not Applicable

Countries of recruitment

United Kingdom

Contacts

• Name: Rachel Adams

Key inclusion & exclusion criteria

Inclusion criteria:
Inclusion criteria for press releases:
1. Involves empirical, peer-reviewed research that is directly relevant to human health. Empirical evidence to include surveys, meta-analyses, systematic reviews and case studies.

Inclusion criteria for press officers (from any of the following):
1. British university for topics related to human health e.g. clinical medicine, psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience, public health, health services and primary care
2. British research councils
3. British-based academic journals
4. British charities

Exclusion criteria:
Exclusion criteria for press releases:
1. Involves empirical, peer-reviewed research that is not directly relevant to human health (e.g. climate change research, astronomy, palaeontology).
2. Do not involve empirical, peer-reviewed research
3. Related to future research
4. Related to grant funding
5. Related to literature reviews, opinion pieces, editorials or commentary

Exclusion criteria for Press Officers:
1. Those from non-UK press offices
2. Those from private/corporate press offices


Age minimum:
Age maximum:
Gender: Both

Health Condition(s) or Problem(s) studied

Misrepresentation and exaggeration of findings from health-related research in press releases and news coverage.
Not Applicable

Intervention(s)

Press officers will send draft copies of press releases to the InSciOut team prior to their release. The InSciOut team will code the press releases and randomly assign them to either an intervention condition or the control condition. Suggested modifications will be made to the press release, based on these conditions and the corresponding journal article, and will be returned to the press officer prior to public release.
Health-related press releases will be randomly assigned to one of four conditions:
Group 1: Causal statement only condition: Causal statements within the press release will be altered to correspond to the study design described in the journal article. For example, if the title of a press release reported that ‘Alcohol improves social skills’ when the study was a correlational piece of research, the title would be changed to read ‘Alcohol may improve social skills’. Modification of causal claims will always increase correspondence between the journal article and the press release.
Group 2: Design information only condition: Information regarding the design of the study will be included in the main body of the press release to convey the strength of causal conclusions that can be drawn (e.g. correlation vs. randomised controlled trial). For example, if a press release reported a causal relationship between the IV and DV when the study was correlational, a suggested change could be to include the following statement: “This was an observational study which does not allow us to conclude that alcohol causes increased social skills as other factors could be involved. We would need to run an experiment to get causal evidence”. For randomised controlled trials a suggested change might be “This study was a randomised controlled trial which allows us to draw firm conclusions about cause and effect”.
Group 3: Causal statement + design information condition: Both manipulations, as

Primary Outcome(s)

News coverage will be monitored for the week prior to the press release date and for one month following release.
News coverage will be coded using a standardised protocol adapted from Sumner et al. (2014). A researcher blind to the intervention condition and published content of the press release will code the news stories.
1. The number of news stories that contain accurate causal claims, relative to the corresponding journal article, and the number of news stories that contain study design information.
2.The second primary outcome measure is news uptake, defined as the number and length of news articles generated by the press release (print, online and broadcast news).

Secondary Outcome(s)

1. Secondary outcome measures include two other forms of exaggeration previously found in news articles (Sumner et al., 2014):
1.1. Advice – measured by the number of news stories that contain an in/appropriate level of advice (i.e. no advice, explicit advice not to the reader or general public or explicit advice to the reader or general public
1.2. Human inference – measured by the number of news stories that contain in/accurate information regarding the study sample (i.e. human or non-human participants)
2. The feasibility and acceptability of the trial. These outcomes will be determined by challenges to implementation of the wording intervention and participation in the trial.

Secondary ID(s)

ES/M000664/1

Source(s) of Monetary Support

Economic and Social Research Council

Ethics review

Status:
Approval date:
Contact:

Cardiff University Ethics Committee, 23/03/2015, ref: EC.15.02.10.4099

Results

• Results available: Yes
• Date Completed: 30/11/2016