Cell Phone Research on TIME's Health Blog

A recent article on TIME Magazine's health blog HealthLand succinctly and accurately describes research that suggests that using a cell phone can distract someone while crossing the street, especially for older people. News articles describing research can often be lengthy and full of jargon, but this article weaves in the methods used in the experiment, the sample population, and the conclusions, in an interesting, story-telling way, rather than bogging it down by summarizing every aspect of the research report. The only aspects that I would say are missing, is the number of participants and comments from the researcher. The article also could have used an outside expert to validate or refute the claims made in this study. We must however remember that this article comes from a health blog, and blogs often serve as a round-up of events, rather than a source of original reporting. CNN.com also published an article on this study, which mentioned that the study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Psychology and Aging. The TIME article should have mentioned the journal title to provide more credibility. The TIME article does, however, mention that these findings support previous studies about driving while using cell-phones which helps the reader assess the validity of the research. TIME is also careful not to make any sweeping suggestions, using phrases like "the findings support the idea."

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