Team:Dalhousie/CatherineReeves

Dr. Catherine Reeve

Interview Transcripts


Why would ¼ of the population with university education not very comfortable (scoring 3/5 or below) to interpret scientific news publications?
Well, with news specifically, students would probably have reservations interpreting the findings because typically, from news perspective, journalists read a scientific study and then report on it. There are journalists who specialize in interpreting scientific information and making it available to people who don’t have a scientific education, but they are not always 100% accurate, or they might input their own bias into how they present the material. Even someone who has a scientific education could see a news article and say okay that’s interesting, but the journalist might have added a little to the story themselves based on the way that they interpreted the story. If the journalist isn’t skilled and completely unbiased in how they interpret a first-hand scientific publication, there is the potential of a lot of misinterpretation from the original source. In that case, someone who has a good scientific education would know to go find the original source themselves and read it and interpret it, but they might not be confident in their abilities to interpret, based on complicated statistics in some of these studies, and therefore, would have to trust a different source’s interpretation. If they cannot read the original data themselves and understand how the original analyses were done and the assumptions required to do those analyses, they might have trouble deciding whether the researcher’s interpretation of their data is accurate or not. I might do some research that results in a lot of data that involves a lot of complex analyses and then based on what I get out of those analyses, I will interpret my data. If someone reads this, they might not understand the data and therefore, might not trust it because they don’t understand the analysis itself. Most students don’t specialize in statistics. Even myself, someone who has done research for many years, would not be confident in interpreting a lot of statistical analyses that are extremely complicated with huge data sets, unless I had a statistician who could aid in interpreting it or describe the analyses for me.
Why would most people with a university education trust scientific reports with dramatic and opinionated language to some extent?
A lot of people trust that a scientist is unbiased, but there are cases where a scientist might receive a lot of money or might be affiliated with certain organizations that would benefit them to interpret their data in a different way than what the data is showing. A good scientist would be unbiased. If the scientist uses this colorful, dramatic language, someone might think that that scientist really believes their findings and that this is finding is very important. I would say that the prime reason would be that people assume scientists are unbiased, so people tend to believe what a scientific report says very easily or very strictly.
More than half of the people with a university education would not verify new scientific claims with credible source half of the time. Why is that? (Why do you think that is?)
Because, especially if it is from a news source and not a primary source, very flashy titles are used to catch people’s attention and get them to read it. If there is a finding, like the “love hormone in chocolate” (Molly Crockett, “Beware the Neurobunk”), this could sound very easy and very appealing, and if that’s truly the case, people are do get excited and want to tell other people. People want to appear as if they understand the topic extremely well. They might share it with others thinking that it is very interesting. And you don’t see many people sharing a lot of primary source articles. That should be what people share, but the titles for those articles can be bogged down with jargon and very technical details and language that not everyone understands. They might seem not as exciting to share.
The most popular resources that people reference to understand a concept are: Google (scholar), Wikipedia, NCIB, PubMed. What are your views on the credibility of these resources?
I think that Google Scholar is quite credible because it gathers all the articles related to the topic that you’re interested in and takes you to the primary sources. So, when you click on a link from Google Scholar, it’ll take you directly to the journal website. A researcher or student should be skilled in determining what is a journal website and what is not. Something like Wikipedia is a little more questionable. It has the option for people to provide citations and such, but people can change that so frequently now, and I’m sure that everyone has seen some hilarious example of somebody else changing a Wikipedia page to something completely wrong. And if you’re not careful in checking your primary sources, you might be reading someone’s completely wrong interpretation of information. It is definitely less credible.
Similar to the group with some post-secondary education, the group without a university degree shows similar trend in terms of trusting skeptical scientific claims and blindly distributing articles without assessments. Do you think general post-secondary education level play a significant role in scientific literacy?
Depending on the type of education, yes definitely. And that’s what I really try to hammer home in the research methods class I teach. Scientific studies are complicated and knowing how to interpret them is very hard. Knowing how to recognize where there could be bias and where there could be a case where the data probably doesn’t apply to you or many people is also very hard. When news sources or journalists interpret scientific articles, they must be very skilled when wording scientific findings so they can do it in such a way that everyone can understand them while still being accurate. That is difficult and that takes a lot of practice. One hope is that most journalists have those qualities- of understanding science and understanding it accurately. I think there is a difference in the education level in the ability to interpret scientific information, unfortunately.
Do you think that decreases with the more education someone gets?
Yes, but not just because they have paid more money and gotten more education. In those cases, people in a Masters or PhD program get to read a lot more science because they must. That being said, someone without a scientific education who reads a lot of scientific articles would probably be as good as someone doing the same thing with a scientific education because reading articles themselves takes a lot of practice and willingness to understand details and think about how it could be interpreted differently. The more you do it, the better you get. I could have read an article six years ago and I could read the same article today and have a completely different interpretation on it. Not because I have taken more classes, but because I have read more articles and therefore, have developed more critical thinking and reasoning skills. It is related to education in that with university education, you get to learn the specifics on how a study is done which allows you to interpret it differently, but someone without a university education could learn to do that as well if they put time into it.