How to stop journalists wilfully misunderstanding your work

Probably not the way you’re thinking

(This is essentially me getting something wrong, rationalised by means of a tiny amount of media theory. If you don’t have time for that kind of nonsense, the ‘how to’ bullets are the bottom, so scroll on down…)

Banning children from using phones at school doesn’t particularly improve their wellbeing and attainment, according to a study covered a lot in the UK this week.

For reference, this is the kind of coverage it got:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8plvqv60lo

https://www.thetimes.com/article/14c5632c-85f8-4897-bf53-f2472600450c

And here’s the actual paper (no paywall): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(25)00003-1/fulltext

One of the researchers, Prof Miranda Pallen, from University of Birmingham, was interviewed by Fi Glover on Times Radio and what I heard me irritated me enough that I posted on BlueSky:

“just heard Fi Glover on Times Radio being immensely dense about a study saying banning phones in school doesn’t materially affect educational benefits. However much the lead researcher patiently explained the point was that school use made little difference because most use is out of school, Glover was determined that the take away was that phone use overall makes no difference.”

And I thought I’d pull it apart at more length here, because why have a newsletter if you can’t rant about things that annoy you?

I went back to listen to it in the cold light of day. Previously-broadcast Times Radio programmes are on the Times Radio app, and you can find the interview there, on the afternoon show with Fi Glover and Jane Garvey, just after the 3pm news on Wednesday 5 February.

It’s pretty short, so here’s the transcription:

Fiona Glover: Banning phones in schools doesn’t actually improve grades or children’s wellbeing, according to a new study. The first-of-its-kind research compared more than 1200 students at thirty different schools and found there was no difference in sleep, classroom behaviour or grades between those schools with phone bans and the schools without. Miranda Pallen is a professor of child and adolescent health at the University of Birmingham and worked on the study. Miranda Pallen, very good afternoon. Were you surprised by these findings?

MP: Good afternoon, well one of the reasons we wanted to undertake this research was because we didn’t have the evidence to know whether bans in schools were working to actually impact on some of the outcomes we were looking at, like mental health and wellbeing, sleep, physical activity, and educational outcomes. We did expect that phone bans would reduce the time that children spend on their phones and therefore improve some of these outcomes, but what we found was that school phone bans on their own aren’t enough to reduce the over all time that young people spend on their phones and using social media and that is an explanation as why school phone bans on their own aren’t enough to impact on these outcomes.

FG: So are you basically saying that if a kid doesn’t use their phone in school, if they then go home, as soon as they leave school they’re using their phone the – time that they have spent not on the phone just doesn’t make any difference?

MP: Yes, that’s what we found. We found that in the schools that restricted mobile phone use there was, when we looked at just time in school there was a small reduction in the time that children spent on their phones, about 40 minutes, but their use over all during the day is so high, on average this age group used their phones for about 4-6 hours, so that small reduction that was achieved in school wasn’t enough to impact on the over all time and impact therefore on the outcomes that we were looking at.

FG: It’s slightly devastating news Miranda Pallen for those schools that have spent a lot of time and actually a lot of money and quite a lot of aggro in banning mobile phones from school hours.

MP: I think it’s really important to say that we understand that schools are working really hard on this issue. They’re working really hard to support children’s mental health and wellbeing and they’re also grappling with this issue around phone and social media use and I think again what we found was that school phone bans didn’t have an impact on the particular outcomes that we looked at but school phone bans in general might have additional benefits that we didn’t measure in this study. So I think a key takeaway from our research is not that phone bans are a waste of time – clearly there’s widespread recognition that phone bans have their place. However, we can’t just rely on phone bans alone to tackle some of these negative impacts that we see in our young people.

FG: Sure. At the very least Miranda I would have thought that a school implementing a phone ban could expect to see a change in grades simply because you would have a better level of concentration wouldn’t you from the kids in school. But does that show up at all in your study.

MP: So we looked at attainment levels in maths and English in our study and when we compared schools that had phone bans in place with the schools that had more permissive policies around phones we found that there was no difference in attainment but what we did find was that increasing time spent on phones and social was associated with worse attainment so it is really important that we do address the time that young people spend on phones and social media if we’re thinking about attainment.

FG: Sure. So you mentioned there the staggering figure of students being on their phones for between 4-6 hours a day. And let’s break that down. Most kids don’t wake up particularly early – I’m not being pejorative about kids but that just tends to happen in the teenage years so they’re getting to school – let’s say they can’t use their phone during school time apart from maybe half an hour at break time. It means they’re leaving school at 3.30 four o’clock, and from 4 o’clock until 8 o’clock or 4 o’clock until 10 o’clock, they are using their phones. I mean it is just worth having a bit of a think through on that isn’t it.

MP: Yes and we found like I said that between 4-6 hours a day are being spent on their phones. It is a huge chunk of the day and it is something that as a society we need to think about how we can support children in managing their phone use and using their phones so that it doesn’t have such a detrimental impact on them. As I said, increasing time spent on the phones and social media is associated with worse outcomes so it is something we really do need to tackle as a society.

FG: If I was going to put you on the spot and I really understand Miranda Pallen that it’s not a binary issue so I’m asking you a binary question and forgive me for that – but if you could change one thing would it be just the content of the phone or the time on the phone. Which one really does the damage?

MP: So in our research we were focussing on the times spent on social media and we did find this association with higher time spent and worse outcomes. So I have to say on the basis of our research that time is really important, however that’s not to say that content is not really important as well. We didn’t look at that in our study but we do actually really need to understand how social media content impacts on our children and young people and then we need to put appropriate measures in place ro und that as well. So it’s absolutely both things that we need to do.

FG: Thank you very much for talking to us this afternoon.

You might think that when you look at the all words typed up in a nice font, my take on the interview was pretty much…well.. wrong.

I agree. I was wrong.

Glover does a few things I think are irritating (her ‘here’s a false dichotomy. Please choose one of my spurious alternatives’ tack, for instance), but the Prof does a good job of keeping to the point and being clear. On the page, her sentences seem rambling and repetitious, but when you’re listening to her speak, she’s clear and authoritative. She also repeats her main point several times, regardless of the question.

I’ve set up many interviews along these lines as a comms person and if that had been one of them, I’d say it went pretty well. I’d also bet she’s had some kind of media training, or at least a prep session.

So how did I get that wrong impression which I ranted about on BlueSky? I’m used to researchers talking about their work, understanding social media is part of my work, and I’ve taught at university level, so I have experience of young people and social media.

And still the actual words that were said didn’t land in my brain.

Clearly something other than pure words are doing some work here.

The obvious trope is that thing about how 93% of what’s communicated is in words, the rest is body language. Other mysteriously precise numbers are available. However, when you look it up, it’s totally spurious.

https://www.scienceofpeople.com/body-language-percentage/

So it’s clearly not that. Moving on.

Luckily there are two bits of Proper Communications Theory that are helpful.

One is pretty much the first ever bit of non-Marxist media theory. Instead it was derived from making radio transmitters.

It’s the Shannon and Weaver model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shannon-Weaver_model_of_communication.svg

Shannon and Weaver were two radio engineers and they came up with model to describe how radio signals are sent and received, and why what’s received isn’t necessarily what’s sent. The answer: noise.

Who knew?

Communications takes that idea and applies it as a metaphor to communicating a message like ‘banning schoolkids from having phones doesn’t help them in itself’. That’s the message Prof Miranda sent, but not what I received. So, we know there’s some noise here.

The noise is in this case involving me is: I was doing other stuff and not listening properly.

The second bit of media theory is reception theory, which has many aspects, but the most useful for our purposes is from Stuart Hall.

(Not a proper academic paper, I admit, but it’s clear and right).

Like a lot of academic theory, reception theory is latinate words wrapped round a pretty obvious idea: all audiences bring their experience, knowledge and preconceptions to how they interpret a message.

In this case, that experience, knowledge and preconceptions are that I find Fi Glover bloody irritating and I’m keen to shout at the any radio she’s on.

Put these two things together, and you have me making unwarranted BlueSky posts.

But, as Marx said ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’.

What do you do about it?

>> SCROLLERS - HERE BE THE TAKE AWAYS! <<

Journalists aren’t in fact thick, but they’re steering you towards the story they want to tell their audience is. Cater for this by:

• Understand who your audience is, and therefore what are they preconceptions

• Understand the context you’ll be in and how you can mitigate things as basic as background noise, or the who your interviewer is, or the nature of the medium

But those are stories for another time….

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