Learning to be a researcher

Last January, when I set out to write a thesis, I was initially interested in media effects, framing, and disparities (from a social justice perspective). I had studied media advocacy in mass media seminar, but I knew that media advocacy was more of an intentional tactic public health folks use to change community norms and less an organic decision that journalists make. I wanted to study the small, everyday decisions journalists have to consider when writing stories and what effects those decisions have on audiences. This desire took me to my main theory of study: framing. I dug through the available framing literature and found it was filled with interesting research questions and studies.

Many of the framing studies I found in the literature included content analyses. I steered away from this design for my own thesis because I knew I wanted to take a more active role in the process. I also viewed the coding part of content analyses as tedious and liked the control experiments give to researchers. I was drawn to the experience of learning how to manipulate something, then controlling for variation, collecting data from human subjects, and analyzing it. I am, however, very grateful to the researchers who took the time to look at how health articles were framed and to those researchers who took the time to interview health journalists about their internal processes. I see now that the content analyses and qualitative interviews are important for developing research questions and learning about next steps. The best researcher would probably employ a combination of these approaches and use both qualitative and quantitative research methods to answer their research questions.

It took months for me to understand how framing theory should guide my literature review and my research questions. I also had a hard time conceptualizing the constructs and how the post-test questions combine into a (hopefully) reliable measure. In fact, l didn’t understand how to create a measure until after I ran my experiment. I thought blame could ask about individual and societal blame, and it was only after I was creating my summary scores that I realized individual and societal blame were separate measures. I worked to remedy this by making different combinations of questions into indices. Unfortunately, I had to use individual questions for two of my measures: societal blame and societal responsibility.

The first experiment I proposed had three independent variables and was far too complex for a first-time experimenter. Brian Houston, who graciously agreed to serve as my external committee member and quantitative methodologist, helped me simplify the design. He challenged me to identify just two independent variables and assured me the process would be complex enough. A few weeks of mental grappling ensued. It was hard to commit. I enjoyed thinking about all the options but settling on a health topic, a frame and a disparity felt so narrowing. The grand ideas were dissolving, and I was left with just a few specifics. It felt like the findings would not be useful enough. But making these decisions also meant getting closer to gathering data. So, I pushed forward. After speaking with my mentors (Katherine Reed, Jeanne Abbott and Kim Walsh-Childers), I chose diabetes as my health topic. It is a pervasive condition with serious physical and economic costs for individuals and society. I also got closer to designing the experiment, with much assistance from Brian. We settled on a 2x2 factorial design between-subjects experiment. My manipulations would be frame: individual and societal and disparity: presence and absence. I chose economics for my disparity. Race disparities are common in the literature, but they are also polarizing. I decided to circumvent race and talk instead about something directly affected by racial disparities: money. The inclusion of a disparity would give me space to talk about the economic cost and economic struggles of a central character.

Once the design was settled, I met with my committee to present the proposal. The meeting itself was helpful. I was nervous, and too stressed from working too many nights and not getting time away between semesters. I was unable to take a step back and effectively edit, so the suggestions from my committee were very welcome. Brian wasn’t able to come because I didn’t send a reminder in time, and I hadn't thought about using an Outlook calendar invitation. I was disappointed but learned a valuable lesson about how to reserve a busy professor's time.

This summer involved a lot of logistics and email exchanges. I waded into Qualtrics and learned how to set up the articles and then randomize them. At times, I was frustrated that I didn’t have more quantitative mentors who could help me. I reached out to a prominent health communication scholar, Glen Cameron, who is based at Missouri, but alas, he didn't have time to help. I pushed forward, knowing that mistakes are part of the process. Guides are crucial, but learning how to be a researcher also means pushing through unfamiliar territory. So I pushed. I worked on the articles. I fought with the technology. I checked off boxes of the many forms required of a master's thesis. By mid-June, with my move to DC looming, I put the research on hold and focused on packing up my life in Columbia. I was nostalgic and proud of all I'd learned. Journalism school was a fantastic choice, and I felt lucky to have called the J-school my home for the past two years.

Once the move to DC was semi-complete, I turned on the heat again. I put in an IRB application and started researching Amazon Mechanical Turk. I read a lot of discussion threads and how-tos for MTurk and got a handle on that world. I also heard back from Betty Jo at Mizzou's IRB office. I got the green light to run my experiment and returned to Qualtrics to edit my articles and the post-test questionnaire. I called the IT department to ask about Qualtrics access and was relieved to learn I had a 30-day grace period. I ran my post-test questionnaire by one of the statisticians at the National Cancer Institute. He graciously assisted. I could tell he was nervous about getting wrapped into a master’s level project, so I again turned inward. I could only get so much advice before I had to just dive in.

I reviewed everything four times and hit run on the MTurk experiment around 5 p.m. on a Thursday in August. The data came flooding in nearly instantly. By Friday morning, I had collected 200 responses. I reviewed them, paying close attention to time spent. The average time on the experiment was about 11 minutes. I rejected people who seemed to complete it too quickly. This turned out to only be one person. I put the experiment back onto the market and collected that last response by Friday afternoon. I approved everyone. Then I waited.

And waited. A week passed. I had a large spreadsheet worth of data from 200 people. I didn’t really know what to do next. I knew I needed to clean the data and then analyze it. But I hadn’t used SPSS since the winter of 2014. About a week later, a coworker asked me how the data analysis was going. It wasn’t. We set an appointment to review data cleaning and analysis for the next day, and I started to dig in.

I found the data cleaning process meditative. It involves creating new columns when needed, running demographic analyses on participants and reviewing the manipulation checks to make sure they worked. After that process, I was able to fix my methodology. I reorganized that section and filled in the holes where the descriptive statistics needed to be. 

My next phase was digging into the data itself. I read tutorials on analysis of variance (ANOVA) and reviewed 2x2 factorial design. I also asked another coworker how she would look for main effects and interactions. I ran tests and stared at the charts. Then I slowly began working through the findings to find meaning in the numbers. 

The results showed that my manipulations (frame and disparity) had a significant impact on readers and that one manipulation was not dependent upon the other. Framing and the inclusion of a disparity had an impact on how readers assigned blame and responsibility to the individual and the government. And the influence was in the direction I had hypothesized. Participants who read an individually oriented article were more likely to assign blame to the individual, while the societally focused article found the opposite. The same was true for responsibility and government solutions: people who read individually oriented articles were more likely to put responsibility on the individual than society or the government and vice versa.

I spent several evenings and weekends staring at data and trying to figure out what it meant and how it could apply to journalists. At first, I struggled to understand the difference between a main effect and an interaction and how to represent my findings in a paper. I am very grateful to Jennifer Taber and Chan Thai at the National Cancer Institute for taking time out of their busy research schedules to mentor me through my roadblocks. I have a much stronger grasp of social science research now that I have run an experiment of my own.

Even though I have a limited scope of real-world journalism, I still feel confident with my discussion and my conclusion. The everyday health journalist most likely uses a combination of the frames and source types I used in my thesis. My manipulations were very pronounced so that I could see the effects clearly. An actual article would probably resemble a mixture of the four articles I produced for this experiment. A newsroom would certainly create something much less "experiment acceptable." But that is the real world. So, I am only able to extrapolate so far. I think it is worth noting though that framing and the inclusion of an economic disparity did have a significant impact on where readers of articles on diabetes placed blame, responsibility and government responsibility. It is a reality I will remember when I have the opportunity to start reporting again (fingers crossed!).

Self-care tips from the Dart Center

I just read through the self-care tips from the Dart Center, and I really like them. I think we should print a few copies off and paste them around the newsroom. They would probably do some good in any newsroom in America, or the world, for that matter. I especially like the on-the-job tips. I also really like that they are directed at news media personnel and not just reporters or photographers. Trauma can affect everyone, including copy editors.

A few days last summer when I was on the copy desk, we had an AP wire story about a violent homicide. I don't remember the details of the story at this point. But I do remember that the reporter included some grotesque and graphic details. I read through the article and felt a little sick. I mentioned it to Margaux, and she said when she worked for the Chicago Tribune a few summers back, she often edited multiple homicide stories a night. She said it took a toll on her and that she felt apprehensive about working as a copy editor in larger markets.

I bring this up because we never actually talked about the issue of editing traumatic stories in my copy editing class. We also haven't really discussed it too much in our trauma class. The reporters, photographers and videographers are all witnessing the primary trauma or the immediate aftermath. And the editors go through the story with the reporter. But the copy editor is in a unique position. Copy editors are abstractly aware of stories coming off the wire or the budget, but don't often consider the content until it's right in front of them. They edit at night once the reporters and news editors have left for the day, so they are more disconnected from the production of the content. They also edit several stories in a row, one or many of which could contain difficult content.

The way we managed the stress of reading difficult stories or seeing difficult photos last year was just to talk about it on the desk with each other. The nice part of the copy desk is that it is a unit. It works very collaboratively. In my opinion, the copy desk is actually one of the more collaborative experiences I've had in the newsroom in terms of the constant communication about the workflow. I would often build galleries on deadline with another person and even co-edit stories on pages right before deadline. It's akin to co-reporting. So, I think there is a built-in community to deal with the aftermath of trauma. But I still think it's worth noting that anyone in the newsroom — page designers, headline writers, copy editors — can experience some tough stuff. So, breaks, discussions, assessments and knowing your limits are important for everyone. I think understanding how trauma affects people could definitely be discussed more in the news editing courses, at least at one or two of the lectures throughout the semester. It'll help inform the editing on the desk and help keep the editors emotionally healthy.

P.S. I've been thinking about this topic all weekend in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake. Media folks around the world are looking at some difficult images and reporting some harrowing details about people being crushed, homes being leveled and health care workers attempting to treat more than 5,000 injured people. It's a disturbing story and one that needs to be told, but everything I've read since yesterday has been tough to stomach.

Ebola coverage (week 13)

Daniel Berehulak, a photographer based in New Delhi, won a Pulitzer for feature photography last week for his coverage of Ebola. He worked for the New York Times as a freelancer for about four months. I really enjoyed the articles in the New York Times and The Guardian about his award because of what he says about why he did the work and why he stayed so long in the epicenter. He remained in Monrovia for 67 days without taking a break. Despite his own internal fears, he could not pull himself away from what was happening in the streets. Treatment centers were overflowing with people and the collection teams couldn't pick up the bodies fast enough. He was based in Monrovia and traveled out to other regions to document the lives of the health center staff, the burial teams, the survivors, the victims and even the father of the first person thought to have died of Ebola. The whole world was frightened of this disease, he said. He was also shocked that more media organizations didn't step up to send staff.

He told the Guardian that Ebola scares the hell out of him because it preys on our humanity and our caregivers. The people who came to the aid of the ill were the ones who got sick next. But he said it was the strength and resilience of the people he witnessed that kept him going. I love that the Times article closes with a discussion about resilience.

In addition to a photography award, the New York Times staff also won a Pulitzer for international reporting on Ebola. As I scrolled through some of the coverage, I remembered where I was when I first read these articles. Most were written last fall in the throes of the epidemic. Some were written earlier and some more recently.

I noticed one article in the list that I never saw back in October. The article is about a container of medical supplies worth $140,000 that had not been cleared by the Sierra Leonean government for two months. Health care workers were dying of Ebola and often working without protective gloves or gowns and these supplies were just sitting near the dock waiting to be unloaded while government officials bickered about protocol. It's a great investigative story about systems not working. It explains that supplies are available but were not sent to the right place at the right time because of corruption, confusion and lack of coordination. It reminded me of the chaos following Hurricane Katrina. Health care workers all over the country, including in Oregon, wanted to go to Louisiana to help, but in the first few hours and days, were told that their health licenses would not be valid across state lines. The bureaucratic red tape prevented people from going to help. I think stories like this one are immensely important in identifying issues and the systemic problems. I wonder if I didn't see it initially because the narratives about people dying were getting more attention from readers, including me. 

Ebola coverage (week 12)

Vice reporter Kayla Ruble did an in-depth story about the vaccine trials in Liberia. I've been following this reporter because she's been working on post-epidemic stories about Ebola for about a month. The article is called "The End of Ebola: Inside the Race to Finish Vaccine Trials in Liberia," and it published yesterday.

I really liked it because it addresses the challenges the vaccine industry is facing now that Ebola cases are waning. It's difficult to determine the success rate of a vaccine if there are no cases to test it again. It's a great problem to have public-health wise, but not a good problem to have if you're working to develop a successful vaccine.

Ruble spoke with a vaccine trial participant about his experience. She led and ended with him, but the majority of her story pulled from interviews with Stephen Kennedy, a Liberian-born American-trained doctor who is working as the country's research coordinator. She also included information from a bioethics fellow at Princeton and one of the other vaccine coordinators. I thought her background on hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Africa was great. There have been 26 outbreaks since 1976 and the name Ebola comes from the Ebola River in northern Democratic Republic of Congo. I haven't seen background like that in an article in months. I think the overall, background and context such as this has been lacking from Ebola stories.

I think she did adopt the language of health workers and few times: "human vector," "efficacy" and "NGO" veer toward jargon and probably either need to be ditched for simpler language or explained. I also found some style errors and typos, so from a copy editing perspective, I think this article could have been cleaned up a little more stateside. However, the reporting itself is solid. Her voice is clear and authoritative and it has a good news value because it addresses the issue of vaccines and hemorrhagic fever.

(The comments at the end of her story are essentially spam, and don't really add much to the conversation.)

A second story of note this week is that the CDC has changed its guidelines regarding sex and Ebola. It previously recommended that survivors wait three months for unprotected sex, but changed that recommendation on Sunday to indefinitely. It found that semen was still present in a survivor nearly 75 days after researchers had ever seen it present. This article includes links to the CDC's guidelines and quotes from a CDC researcher and a WHO official. It also included the voice of a Liberian doctor who also survived Ebola. The article was well-written and officially sourced. It also links over to an April 16 article about why the virus survives so much longer in the testes in men and the placenta in pregnant women. I like that this earlier article addresses the complications with recommending condoms indefinitely. The quote from a WHO official is great: "People have sex lives. Sexual activity should not be restricted beyond the point when there is unlikely to be a risk, as the virus should eventually disappear." Public health officials obviously have a dilemma on their hands, so I look forward to more reporting on this topic. It's more in the realm of HIV at this point, which the reporter addresses in the article. The ending is almost unbelievable. A Sierra Leonean woman died of Ebola recently, and her husband said that officials came to collect semen. He refused saying he is impotent, so they came back with a laptop and played pornographic videos while they tried to stimulate him manually with soap. A female worker also undressed him and also removed some of her clothing. Wow. What a story. I burst out laughing when I read it because it's so preposterous, but it's also so humiliating if it's true. It's a bit of a he said/she said, so I'm not sure the truth will ever emerge, but it's definitely a detail worth reporting. It shows just how crazy some of this "data collection" can be.

An article in Time, titled "Everything to know about Ebola and Sexual Intercourse," uses a Q&A story form to talk about sex, semen and Ebola. It includes information about the CDC guidelines and then walks through the questions "you're too squeamish to ask." I like this approach because it holds my attention, explains more complicated medical information about the difference between blood and semen and talks about how the CDC is providing the couple with condoms indefinitely. The question that it doesn't answer is: Is the CDC distributing condoms throughout West Africa to Ebola survivors? And if so, what are the roll-out plans for this distribution process. It was a good episodic piece about the change in guidelines, but it was short and left out some of my lingering questions.

(None of these articles has comments.)

Covering a traumatic event in real time

Last Wednesday evening was quiet. It was almost too quiet. I edited a couple of stories and by 8 p.m., I had nothing else coming in and nothing in the queues. Django was behaving itself, and the scanner just hummed quietly with the occasional status check breaking through the static. Timoshanae Wellmaker walked breathlessly into the newsroom around 8:30 p.m. with an unbudgeted story. I was grateful for the copy and excited to have something to do. We tweaked and re-tweaked and sent the story along.

It was only 9:30 p.m.

I checked my inbox and saw a release from the Columbia PD. Four hours earlier a man slid into a woman's car while she shopped at Moser's and attacked her when she returned from buying groceries. She fought him off, and the man was still at large. The GA reporter had signed out a few hours earlier, so I printed off the release and immediately began writing. We posted the story as quickly as we could, but it still took about an hour to get it through the queues.

I started packing up and nervously wondered if they'd caught the guy. I felt apprehensive about biking over to Aaron's with an armed man still running around Columbia. The CPD Twitter page kept adding updates about the guy, but they all kept repeating what was in the release. I hung around.

At 11 p.m. decided to head home. But looking back, I don't think I actually thought I was leaving. I sensed something strange in the air. Then the phone rang.

Carolyn Heger told me she'd heard shots fired in the Hitt Street garage. She dropped to the ground and once it was over, she called me. I told her to start reporting from the apartment. I sent her phone numbers for the CPD. She called several times, but no one picked up. She tweeted some pictures and watched the scene unfold. She saw more than a dozen cop cars. Her boyfriend saw a body. Maybe two. We heard over the scanner that there had been a shooting with a baby involved. Everything was chaotic. At first, I assumed the worst. This man might have shot someone. He could still be on the loose. Our night news editor went downstairs with one of the sports editors to make sure the doors to Lee Hills were locked. One of the doors was open.

Carolyn called back. The scene seemed safe, so she was going down to the garage to talk to the police and if she could find them, some witnesses. A copy editor named Ethan Colbert put on a yellow media vest and got a reporter's notebook from our print news editor. I felt nervous sending him out, but the news editors didn't stop him, so I didn't say anything. I still wonder if I should have.

Carolyn called again to say she had talked with some witnesses and a few people who went to rescue their car from the garage. I told her Ethan was headed over to help. I asked her to keep calling the police. We received an alert from the MU police saying that the suspect from an earlier armed robbery had been killed. But they did not confirm the identity of the suspect. We all felt less nervous now. It appeared the man wasn't still at large. We put up a burst, and I started a story file.

Ethan called. He was going to cross the tape. Photographers came in and began uploading photos. Carolyn returned and started furiously typing. She'd gathered several witness accounts. Then something sad and strange happened. She received word that a few of her sorority sisters had been talking with Adair when he'd been shot. She asked me if she should call them. I paused. My immediate response was "yes, of course, let's call them to get that eye witness account." My second thought was a flashback of a semester's worth of learning from my reporting on traumatic events course. I paused and told Carolyn that we probably shouldn't call. The story was shocking enough, and I didn't want to hurt those girls. We quickly talked through it and agreed to leave them out. Looking back, I think we made a good choice. Carolyn took off and Ethan came in to write the top.

Their reporting blended perfectly into a story. It was seamless. We wrote a print version and then spent more time writing a more detailed online story. I don't have many recollections of time from that night. I know Carolyn left around midnight and I got to sleep around 3:30 a.m., but it is hard to remember everything that happened before and after those time stamps.

I do remember that everything felt collaborative. We didn't have time for anything except the work. We were hyper-focused on getting the information, verifying it and meeting the deadline. I noticed that my memories from that night are different from other memories of events not involving so much stress. Like we learned in class, some of the memories are super sharp and others are not in focus at all. I didn't feel hunger. I don't remember going to the bathroom. My normal human urges were paused. The next day I was wired. I could feel that my body was still on high alert.

I talked through the experience with some of the editors and that helped. I read the stories and the updates. I talked a lot with Aaron. I still have a lot of questions. My sense is that Mark Adair was a violent and brutal man, but I still believe the system failed him. Did he deserve to be shot to death in the Hitt Street garage Wednesday night? I don't think so. Why was this man who was so obviously a threat to society simply released into the world and then so quickly able to obtain a gun and threaten people? I'd like to see some Act 2 stories about this shooting. I'd like to learn more about who this man was and what the ramifications of the events of that night are. I'd really love to read a story about the woman who fought this guy off or how the women who were talking with him are coping with that traumatic experience. I'd also like to read more about the process people go through when they leave prison and receive parole. How often do people in similar situations completely lose control? This story seems like fertile ground for Act 2 and 3 reporting.

Interview with an Ebola survivor and analysis of his coverage (week 11)

I emailed Ashoka Mukpo yesterday afternoon in a last ditch effort to connect with an Ebola survivor. And this time he wrote back with his telephone number! Talking with him was incredible. He has a lot to share, and I could have happily talked with him for hours about his experience. He was kind enough to give me a half an hour and I am certain some of the lessons he passed on will stay with me for some time.

Mukpo is originally from Rhode Island, but he doesn't strongly identify with that place. He's currently living in London and is focusing on his recovery. He has spent the past couple years living in Liberia. He focused on worker's rights, particularly surrounding the mining industry. He freelanced for media organizations as well. He contributes to Vice News, Africa is a Country and others. When the epidemic raged back last summer, he returned to help raise awareness of the virus. He is most proud of a piece called "To live and die with Ebola in Liberia," which ran in Africa is a Country. The article digs into some of the economic and political underpinnings of the crisis. He addresses the quarantine in West Point and why many of the residents living in that slum distrust the government and the aid workers. He critiques the corruption and provides an inside view of why the government itself is fueling the distrust. He uses a thematic frame and includes great contextual and historical information. He is able to write with authority because he understands the issue. Unfortunately, comments are not a feature on this blog, so I'm not sure how people reacted to it. But it does have hundreds of shares on social media. My own response to this article is admiration. He offered an inner-sanctum view of the situation, which I didn't often read in the Western media. I didn't see this piece when it came out and I didn't find it through search either. This article shows that searching out African-based media outlets is a good idea because it offers viewpoints that might not be included in the Western media.

Mukpo also covered Ebola for Vice, Al Jazeera and the Washington Post. He wrote three opinion pieces for Al Jazeera from August through December and called for more international assistance. Many in Liberia knew the epidemic was worsening, but international leaders acted too late, he said.

His most recent article for Al Jazeera, published today, is called "Survivor guilt: Former Ebola patients struggle with virus' legacy." This article addresses the depression, lingering physical effects of Ebola, such as eye problems and joint pain, and the financial hardships that result from losing the breadwinner. Many people have been stigmatized and are left out of the aid programs meant to help them, he reported. This is a later Act 2 piece about survivors and where they are now. One survivor said when he found out he had survived, he was not happy. He was alone. He had no reason to survive. This article was difficult to read. I admit I teared up at one point. The woman who lost her child and her parents reminded me a little of Sonali Deraniyagala. There's a picture of woman in the article holding up pictures of her mom and her dad, and it's really hard to look at. Readjusting to this new reality must be hell for her.

Mukpo's writing is heartbreaking and real. I hope he continues writing Act 2 stories and slowly begins to move to Act 3. We need more stories like this one that reminds people that Ebola is not over. The trauma of the crisis last fall continues for thousands.

Ebola song

I found this amazing song yesterday as I was Googling Ebola. Liberia's Ministry of Health worked with musicians to release songs that educated people about Ebola. The lyrics cover how the virus is passed, how people can protect themselves and the chorus repeats that Ebola is here and is real. It tells people to avoid body contact, avoid traditional burial practices and to wear protective equipment when burying a body. It emphasizes that there is no treatment. It says Ebola cannot spread through air or water but can pass through direct contact with blood, saliva, urine, stool, sweat or semen of an infected person or an infected animal. I think it's a brilliant public health tactic. Music is such an integral part of life every culture, so it's a great medium for getting the message out.