Data in the News

During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a heavy reliance on statistical, data-driven news stories and information, including daily infection rates, mortality rates, vaccination rates. Data was available at the municipal, provincial, national and global levels, and comparisons were made across groups in order to estimate the spread and severity of the pandemic. Although numerical and statistical information have always been an important element of news stories, the pandemic revealed some important gaps in people’s ability to process and understand data.

The objective of the current project is to examine how audiences engage with and understand different types of data within Canadian online news media and the ways Canadian audiences best understand this numerical and statistical content. This study aims to further explore the ongoing relationship between types of data (percentages, frequencies, comparisons) and how they are presented, people’s individual characteristics and backgrounds, and their overall comprehension levels.  

The specific research question for this project:

RQ1: To what extent do different presentations of quantitative data in Canadian online news media impact the news readers’ ability to correctly interpret this content?

RQ2: Are there any correlations between the news readers’ level of comprehension and the different types of data and/or their presentation in news stories?

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