File this one under News of the Weird:
Health Journal: Hip government exercise campaign looks for its next move
The story is about the apparent success of the Center for Disease Control’s “verb” ad campaign — designed to fight obesity among children and teens. A recent study in the journal Pediatrics found that kids who had seen the Verb campaign “reported one-third more physical activity during their free time than kids who hadn’t.”
Carrie expresses skepticism since it’s hard to see that cryptic ads could really make such a difference in bahavior. In addition, it’s an observational study: the ads were shown everywhere, then they compared kids who recalled seeing the ads to kids who didn’t. They did a baseline study, so they could control for pre-treatment level of exercise, but they didn’t do much on this. I would have liked to see scatterplots and regressions.
Here’s the article in the journal Pediatrics reporting the comparison of exercise levels for kids who recalled or didn’t recall the ad campaign. Perhaps an interesting example for a statistics or policy analysis class. As usual, I’m not trying to shoot down the study, just to point out an interesting example of scientific ambiguity. I’d think there’s lots of potential for discussion about how a future such study could be conducted.