Understanding and optimising health-related press releases as complex public health interventions

公众对科学的认知和理解对于社会应对当今挑战的能力至关重要，这些挑战包括气候变化、老龄化和医疗保健成本上升。因此，至关重要的是优化新科学的传播，使其既准确又引人入胜，并避免误导读者或造成危害公共健康的恐慌（如MMR疫苗恐慌）。全国性的媒体是促进更好地了解健康问题以及治疗和生活方式改善背后的科学的最大机会。由于大多数科学新闻是通过学术期刊和大学的新闻稿传达给记者的，我们将重点关注如何优化链中的这一关键环节。我们的项目旨在识别新闻稿中导致不准确的新闻报道和/或影响新闻报道的特征。例如，我们假设科学家使用的一些词通常被记者和外行读者解释为更强烈的含义（例如“预测”对科学家来说意味着“统计相关”，但对外行读者来说意味着“原因”）。我们将对这些特征进行实验，以收集这些特征是否以及如何引起误解的经验证据。与此同时，我们将对科学家、新闻官员和记者进行调查，以收集关于他们如何互动以及他们遇到了哪些困难的信息。由此，我们将制定基于证据的指导方针，以优化新闻稿。

Public perception and understanding of science is crucial to society's ability to respond today's challenges, such as climate change, aging, and the rising cost of health care. It is therefore crucial to optimise the communication of new science so it is both accurate and engaging, and to avoid misleading readers or creating scares that harm public health (such as the MMR vaccine scare). The national press represents the greatest opportunity for promoting better understanding of health concerns and the science behind treatments and lifestyle improvements. Since the majority of science news is communicated to journalists via press releases from academic journals and universities, we will focus on how to optimise this critical link in the chain. Our project aims to identify features of press releases that cause inaccurate press coverage and/or influence press uptake. For example, we hypothesise that some words used by scientists are routinely interpreted with stronger meanings by journalists and lay readers (such as 'predict' meaning 'statistically correlate with' for scientists, but 'causes' for lay readers). We will conduct experiments on these features, to gather empirical evidence on whether and how such features do cause misinterpretation. At the same time, we will conduct surveys of scientists, press officers and journalists to gather information about how they interact and what difficulties they experience. From this, we will produce evidence-based guidelines for optimising press releases.