Article: Dear diary, you make me sick| New Scientist
The above article reports some results from a study at Staffordshire University that purpoterdly disputes the common understanding that writing can be theraputic and that diaries are a form of therapy. In this study, researchers studied 94 diarists and compared their health with that of 41 non-diarists. That is, they went to a bunch of college kids, and asked them fill out a survey. <<-- 1! survey.
The very first paragraph of the article reports the results in a language that leaves no doubts as to their authenticity - "Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness."
Nearly 8 paragraphs later they add the "problems" of the study - that despite the language in the first two thirds of the article there is actually no basis for asserting a causal direction. Did diary writing cause these problems or did the problems cause people to write diaries? That's relegated to future work, of course, but who cares? And how many individuals read to the end of the article anyway? The is sensationalism at its best in a magazine that is supposed to be at least half way reputable. It really bites me that researchers will do studies that are purely correlational (proper longitudinal studies, of course, take too much time, dont' they?) and then make causual claims that appear in publication. I bet that this type of report would not make it through peer review, but the New Scientist is happy to publish it!
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