Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of California, 3333 California Street, Suite 420, San Francisco, CA, 94143-0613, USA.
BMC Public Health. 2018 Sep 17;18(1):1129. doi: 10.1186/s12889-018-6020-6.
In the late 20th century, US localities began increasing the minimum age of legal access (MLA) for tobacco from 18 to 21 years by enacting "Tobacco 21" ordinances. Although these policies have a strong evidence base and broad popular support, popular media coverage of tobacco control laws has not always been accurate. This study sought to determine if contemporaneous popular media reporting accurately reflected the scientific findings regarding increased tobacco MLAs.
We searched LexisNexis for popular media reports that (1) addressed proposed or enacted Tobacco 21 ordinances and were (2) published in English, (3) drawn from a US news source, and (4) written after January 2004. We conducted a content analysis for quality based on a validated measure of accuracy of reporting, the Index of Scientific Quality (ISQ), which allows assessment of articles by assigning scores ranging from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).
Searches yielded 378 articles; after screening for relevance and duplicates, 98 were included in the review. All studies identified through the keyword searches addressed Tobacco 21 policies. The average global score identifying the scientific quality of the articles was 2.98 of 5. Over three-quarters of the popular media articles addressing Tobacco 21 laws were written after a systematic review of these policies was released by the Institute of Medicine and approximately 4 in 10 cited findings from that review.
Popular media reports on Tobacco 21 laws demonstrated average overall quality and relied on both anecdotal and scientific evidence, in contrast to previous studies found that popular media reports on tobacco issues demonstrated low overall quality and relied primarily on anecdotal evidence. The systematic review of increased MLAs for tobacco written by the Institute of Medicine diffused quickly into popular reporting, suggesting that this type of evidence might improve research translation.
20 世纪后期，美国各地通过颁布“烟草 21 号法令”，将法定吸烟年龄（MLA）从 18 岁提高到 21 岁。尽管这些政策有坚实的证据基础和广泛的民众支持，但大众媒体对控烟法律的报道并不总是准确的。本研究旨在确定当代大众媒体报道是否准确反映了关于提高烟草 MLA 的科学发现。
我们在 LexisNexis 上搜索了针对拟议或颁布的“烟草 21 号法令”的大众媒体报道，这些报道符合以下条件：（1）涉及“烟草 21 号法令”；（2）用英文撰写；（3）来自美国新闻来源；（4）发表于 2004 年 1 月之后。我们根据报道准确性的验证指标——科学质量指数（ISQ），对报道质量进行了内容分析，该指数允许通过分配 1（最低）到 5（最高）的分数来评估文章。
搜索结果得到 378 篇文章；经过相关性和重复项筛选，有 98 篇文章纳入综述。通过关键词搜索确定的所有研究都涉及“烟草 21 号法令”政策。确定文章科学质量的全球平均分数为 5 分制的 2.98 分。超过四分之三的大众媒体文章都涉及“烟草 21 号法令”，这些文章都是在医学研究所发布了这些政策的系统综述之后撰写的，大约有 4 篇文章引用了该综述的研究结果。
大众媒体对“烟草 21 号法令”的报道显示出平均的整体质量，并且依赖于轶事证据和科学证据，这与之前的研究结果不同，之前的研究表明，大众媒体对烟草问题的报道整体质量较低，主要依赖于轶事证据。医学研究所撰写的关于提高烟草 MLA 的系统综述迅速传播到大众报道中，这表明这种类型的证据可能会改善研究转化。
