This exercise is designed to help you see what can and cannot be accomplished with survey/correlational types of research. Read the following two news stories on GauchoSpace: “Does this ad make me fat” (2013) and “Facebook causes rickets, suicide…and now syphilis” (2010), and then answer the questions below.

What kind of claim (e.g., correlational versus causal) is being made regarding (in one story) advertising and obesity and (in the other story) Facebook (or Twitter) and various social problems?

What were the researchers’ actual findings in the studies being reported (i.e., what specific link did they find between ad placement and higher obesity and how was Facebook/Twitter connected at with the various social problems)?

How might the reporting about these findings either mislead or help readers understand the relationship between variables in these studies? Is there a problem with concluding that advertising leads to obesity or that using Facebook causes certain social problems? Can you make a case that the causality between these variables could reasonably go in the other direction? Or be explained by third variables?