How to Interpret Health Research
Posted by Rachel on March 30, 2007
Feminist blogger Echidne is on this subject, and has the following advice for when you read a study or a media report of research:
Make sure that you ignore the overall statements at the beginning of the story initially. Read down to find which measures the study actually used and how those measures correlated with each other. Think about what this might mean. Then go back and read the overall arguments and assertions and see if they actually follow from the study’s mechanical findings.
Interpreting research can be considerably more complicated that that, but it’s good advice nonetheless. Here in Libraryland, we typically skip completely over the abstract on a first read of a published study, to avoid being biased by the authors’ take on their work and their interpretation of their findings, which is what the abstract represents. The meat of the study, the information that tells you whether what they did is valid, whether it makes sense, whether they neglected to account for something, if the statistical methods were reliable and whether there is any real significance to the findings, what population the research applies to, etc. is going to be in the body of the paper. There have been times when I’ve read papers that make big claims in the abstract, but the methods and results don’t fully support those conclusions. Always take media reports of health research and authors’ abstracts with a grain of salt.
The “How to Read a Paper” series by Trisha Greenhalgh provides a good primer on understanding the medical literature. A couple of the guides in the series of particular interest:
-How to read a paper : getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about)
-Assessing the methodological quality of published papers
-Statistics for the non-statistician. I: Different types of data need different statistical tests
-Statistics for the non-statistician. II: “Significant” relations and their pitfalls
-Papers that report drug trials
[Hat tip to Our Bodies Our Blog for the pointer to Echidne's post.]
Slartibartfast said
Boy, ain’t that the truth! Especially on studies based on surveys. This is something that should be spread far and wide.
davidrothman.net » Blog Archive » How to interpret health research said
[...] at Women’s Health News, Rachel recently posted good advice and links on interpreting health research. There probably won’t be a lot new information here for a lot of medical librarians, but [...]