Summary Of Soda And Violence

There are many journal articles on the internet that consist of journalists that try to report what is going on in the research world. Many articles are written to inform the public of possible cause-and-effect relationships that are being observed. However, the problem with many articles in the media is that results are not always reported accurately. Often, facts are left out that cause the reader to be misled. In the article, Soda and Violence, written by Elizabeth Gudrais in 2012, she writes about how new studies have found that large consumptions of soda are causing violence in adolescents. This paper will analyze how well the journalist reported the original article.

In the journalist’s story, Gudrais wrote about how heavy soda consumption

This study was a correlational study to figure out if there was an association between consuming non-diet carbonated soda and violence in teenagers. The independent variable in this study was the soda. Researchers asked the participants how much soda they had consumed in the past week and then were measured after 30 days on how much violent behaviors they had performed. The dependent variable was how much aggression was shown in those 30 days. To control for any extraneous variables, researchers made sure to control for age, gender, race, irregular sleeping habits, and drug or alcohol use. Researchers found that there was a significant, strong, positive correlation between soda and violence. In the study, it was found that high schoolers who drank more than five cans of soda per week were more likely to be engaging in violent and aggressive acts. These aggressive acts would consist of physical fights that included acts such as punching, shoving, kicking, chocking, etc. Threats of hurting another child with a weapon or even carrying a weapon was also included as aggressive acts. Researchers found that students who consumed more soda engaged in more violent acts. These finding support the theory that large amounts of soda consumption result in violence. However,

She made many association claims about the correlation between soda and violence, alcohol/tobacco use and violence, and soda and depression/suicidal behaviors. However, she did not claim that soda is the cause of these behaviors. However, if she were to make the causal claim that soda causes violence, it would not be valid. When looking at the causation, the covariance, temporal precedence, and internal validity must be analyzed. The covariance rule would be met in this study because violence was changing as soda was changing. The temporal precedence rule would be met also because soda must come first in time before violence. However, the internal validity rule would not be met. There are many possible alternative explanations for why violence might be increased, other than soda. As the study describes, extraneous effects such as gender, age, and parenting might also cause an increase in