The Effect of Falsely Balanced Reporting of the Autism-Vaccine Controversy on Vaccine Safety Percept

Background to the problem under investigation

Read the following article carefully. Then provide a report on the background to the problem under investigation, tell me what the author(s) predicted, what they found, and what the results mean.

Finally, discuss what you might do differently if you had the chance to conduct more research on this issue.

Be sure to address the following questions:

What were the hypotheses of the research or the purposes for which the research was carried out. Identify the independent and dependent variables.

2) What were the methods used for testing the hypotheses?
3) What were the main results of the study and how do these results relate to the hypotheses?
4) What would you do differently?

Your review should be no longer than 2 pages ( i.e., 500 words). Feel free to use point form.

Some tips for better answers:

If you are citing articles, try to cite in-text so you are attributing the right source to the right sentence, so we know where you got the idea if it is not your own. This can also lead to very strong arguments if you use your own words but have the article to back up your own point.

Make sure you are paraphrasing very well, changing 1 or 2 words, or punctuation is not enough. The sentence structure should change and there should no more than 4 words that match the source sentence (major words), and higher concept words should be attributed to their source.

You can state facts without reference, but only very well-known solid facts like “Mr. Trudeau is Canada’s current Prime Minister”, not for example "this substance causes cancer" (you would need to find a source for this, whether it is a study or the world health organization). Similarly, you can state opinions without citation (unless the idea came from somewhere else) but be clear in stating that it is an opinion.

The best answers received go beyond websites (sometimes referred to as secondary sources) and actually look at a study (primary sources as long as it is not a review paper) that is relevant or supports their answer. This avoids using someone else’s words because you cannot think of a better way to describe it.

In summary, paraphrase and use your own words, read sources but don’t claim them as your own, cite well, properly, and often. If it’s not your original idea, it needs to be sourced.

Controversy surrounding an autism–vaccine link has elicited considerable news media attention.

Despite being widely discredited, research suggests that journalists report this controversy by presenting claims both for and against a link in a relatively ‘balanced’ fashion. To investigate how this reporting style inflfluences judgments of vaccine risk, we randomly assigned 320 under graduate participants to read a news article presenting either claims both for/against an autism–vaccine link, link claims only, no-link claims only or non-health-related information.

Participants who read the balanced article were less certain that vaccines are safe, more likely to believe experts were less certain that vaccines are safe and less likely to have their future children vaccinated. Results suggest that balancing con-flflicting views of the autism–vaccine controversy may lead readers to erroneously infer the state of expert knowledge regarding vaccine safety and negatively impact vaccine intentions.