Re: UKNM: 'higher levels of depression and loneliness'

[Bill Thompson]

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At 13:16 03/09/98 +0100, Steve Bowbrick  wrote:

>I found this article (snipped below) rather disquieting. Can't understand

>why it hasn't been picked up elsewhere. Researchers in the respected Human

>Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon have done some quite

>credible research etc etc.


Steve - have you seen the paper?  It's online at 


http://homenet.andrew.cmu.edu/progress/HN.impact.10.htm

with their stats etc in there. After reading it through and

discussing it with a psychologiist friend of mine (OK, it

was my wife Troy) we decided that they had taken

a vast amount of data and "gone fishing" for marketable

results. They do not have a good model of what is going on,

their sample is very small, their effects are small, they

have not used the best known scales to measure depression,

a lot of their questions were forced true/false ("I feel miserable

when I'm online" T/F), which is know to produce unreliable

results because it does not allow middle ground... and so on and

so on.


You know what's really depressing is that all the papers

and radio/TV picked up on this (I did a slot for world service

and for News24) but nobody had actually taken the five minutes

to go online and find the pre-publication copy of the paper, so

all anyone did was repeat what the CMU people had put in their

press release - which was a nicely glossed version.


so don't believe all you read   - especially online!


Bill


PS how's the baby?


x


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