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How To Write a Good Research Question: Guide with Definition, Tips & Examples

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Sameer Bhatia is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ProProfs.com. He believes that software should make you happy and is driven to create a 100-year company that delivers delightfully ... Read more

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Market Research Specialist

Emma David, a seasoned market research professional, specializes in employee engagement, survey administration, and data management. Her expertise in leveraging data for informed decisions has positively impacted several brands, enhancing their market position.

Research questions form the backbone of any study, guiding researchers in their search for knowledge and understanding. Framing relevant research questions is the first essential step for ensuring the research is effective and produces valuable insights.

In this blog, we’ll explore what research questions are, tips for crafting them, and a variety of research question examples across different fields to help you formulate a well-balanced research questionnaire.

Let’s begin.

What Is a Research Question?

A research question is a specific inquiry or problem statement guiding a research study, outlining the researcher’s intention to investigate. Think of it as a roadmap for your paper or thesis – it tells you exactly what you want to explore, giving your work a clear purpose.

A good research question not only helps you focus your writing but also guides your readers. It gives them a clear idea of what your research is about and what you aim to achieve. Before you start drafting your paper and even before you conduct your study, it’s important to write a concise statement of what you want to accomplish or discover.

This sets the stage for your research and ensures your work is focused and purposeful.

Why Are Research Questions Important?

Research questions are the cornerstone of any academic or scientific inquiry. They serve as a guide for the research process, helping to focus the study, define its goals, and structure its methodology. 

Below are some of its most significant impacts, along with hypothetical examples to help you understand them better:

1. Guidance and Focus

Research questions provide a clear direction for the study, enabling researchers to narrow down the scope of their investigation to a manageable size. Research efforts can become scattered and unfocused without a well-defined question without a well-defined question, leading to wasted time and resources.

For example, consider a researcher interested in studying the effects of technology on education. A broad interest in technology and education could lead to an overwhelming range of topics to cover. However, by formulating a specific research question such as, “ How does the use of interactive digital textbooks in high school science classes affect students’ learning outcomes?” the researcher can focus their study on a specific aspect of technology in education, making the research more manageable and directed.

2. Defining the Research Objectives

A well-crafted research question helps to clearly define what the researcher aims to discover, examine, or analyze. This clarity is crucial for determining the study’s objectives and ensures that every step of the research process contributes toward achieving these goals.

For example, in a study aimed at understanding the impact of remote work on employee productivity, a research question such as “ Does remote work increase productivity among information technology professionals? ” directly sets the objective of the study to measure productivity levels among a specific group when working remotely.

3. Determining the Research Methodology

The research question influences the choice of methodology, including the design, data collection methods, and analysis techniques. It dictates whether the study should be qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods and guides the selection of tools and procedures for conducting the research.

For example, in a research question like “ What are the lived experiences of first-generation college students? ” a qualitative approach using interviews or focus groups might be chosen to gather deep, nuanced insights into students’ experiences. In contrast, a question such as “ What percentage of first-generation college students graduate within four years?” would require a quantitative approach, possibly utilizing existing educational data sets for analysis.

4. Enhancing Relevance and Contribution

A well-thought-out research question ensures that the study addresses a gap in the existing literature or solves a real-world problem. This relevance is crucial for the contribution of the research to the field, as it helps to advance knowledge, inform policy, or offer practical solutions.

For example, in a scenario where existing research has largely overlooked the environmental impacts of single-use plastics in urban waterways, a question like “ What are the effects of single-use plastic pollution on the biodiversity of urban waterways?” can fill this gap, contributing valuable new insights to environmental science and potentially influencing urban environmental policies.

5. Facilitating Data Interpretation and Analysis

Clear research questions help in structuring the analysis, guiding the interpretation of data, and framing the discussion of results. They ensure that the data collected is directly relevant to the questions posed, making it easier to draw meaningful conclusions.

For example, in a study asking, “ How do social media algorithms influence political polarization among users? ” the data analysis would specifically focus on the mechanisms of algorithmic content delivery and its effects on user behavior and political views. This focus makes it straightforward to interpret how algorithm-induced echo chambers might contribute to polarization.

Types of Research Questions

Understanding the different types of research questions is essential for researchers to effectively design and conduct studies that align with their research objectives and methodologies

These questions can be broadly categorized into three main types: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research questions.

Let’s explore each type in-depth, along with some examples.

Type A: Quantitative Research Questions

Quantitative research involves the collection and analysis of numerical data to answer specific research questions or hypotheses. It focuses on quantifying relationships, patterns, and phenomena, often using statistical methods for analysis. Quantitative research questions are typically structured and aim to explore relationships between variables or assess the impact of interventions.

Quantitative research questions can again be subcategorized into three distinct types:

1. Descriptive Questions :

Descriptive questions aim to describe characteristics, behaviors, or phenomena within a population. These questions often start with words like “ how much ,” “ how many ,” or “ what is the frequency of .” They provide a snapshot of a particular situation or phenomenon.

Example: “ What is the average age of first-time homebuyers in the United States?”

2. Comparative Questions :

Comparative questions seek to compare two or more groups, conditions, or variables to identify differences or similarities. They often involve the use of statistical tests to determine the significance of observed differences or associations.

Example: “Is there a significant difference in academic performance between students who receive tutoring and those who do not?”

3. Relationship Questions:

Relationship questions explore the associations or correlations between variables. They aim to determine the strength and direction of relationships, allowing researchers to assess the predictive power of one variable on another.

Example: “What is the relationship between exercise frequency and levels of anxiety among adults?”

Type B: Qualitative Research Questions

Qualitative research involves the exploring and understanding of complex phenomena through an in-depth examination of individuals’ experiences, behaviors, and perspectives. It aims to uncover meaning, patterns, and underlying processes within a specific context, often through techniques such as interviews, observations, and content analysis.

Types of qualitative research questions:

1. Exploratory Questions:

Exploratory questions seek to understand a particular phenomenon or issue in depth. They aim to uncover new insights, perspectives, or dimensions that may not have been previously considered.

Example: “What are the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in accessing healthcare services in rural communities?”

2. Descriptive Questions:

Descriptive questions aim to provide a detailed description or portrayal of a phenomenon or social context. They focus on capturing the intricacies and nuances of a particular situation or setting.

Example: “What are the communication patterns within multicultural teams in a corporate setting?”

3. Explanatory Questions:

Explanatory questions delve into the underlying reasons, mechanisms, or processes that influence a phenomenon or behavior. They aim to uncover the ‘why’ behind observed patterns or relationships.

Example: “What factors contribute to employee turnover in the hospitality industry?”

Type C: Mixed-Methods Research Questions

Mixed-methods research integrates both quantitative and qualitative approaches within a single study, allowing researchers to gain a comprehensive understanding of a research problem. Mixed-method research questions are designed to address complex phenomena from multiple perspectives, combining the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

Types of Mixed-Methods Research Questions:

1. Sequential Questions:

Sequential questions involve the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data in separate phases or stages. The findings from one phase inform the design and implementation of the subsequent phase.

Example: “Quantitatively, what are the prevalence rates of mental health disorders among adolescents? Qualitatively, what are the factors influencing help-seeking behaviors among adolescents with mental health concerns?”

2. Concurrent Questions:

Concurrent questions involve the simultaneous collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. Researchers triangulate findings from both methods to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the research problem.

Example: “How do students’ academic performance (quantitative) correlate with their perceptions of school climate (qualitative)?”

3. Transformative Questions:

Transformative questions aim to use mixed-methods research to bring about social change or inform policy decisions. They seek to address complex societal issues by combining quantitative data on prevalence rates or trends with qualitative insights into lived experiences and perspectives.

Example: “What are the barriers to accessing healthcare services for underserved communities, and how can healthcare policies be redesigned to address these barriers effectively?”

Steps to Developing a Good Research Question

Developing a good research question is a crucial first step in any research endeavor. A well-crafted research question serves as the foundation for the entire study, guiding the researcher in formulating hypotheses, selecting appropriate methodologies, and conducting meaningful analyses.

Here are the steps to developing a good research question:

Identify a Broad Topic

Begin by identifying a broad area of interest or a topic that you would like to explore. This could stem from your academic discipline, professional interests, or personal curiosity. However, make sure to choose a topic that is both relevant and feasible for research within the constraints of your resources and expertise.

Conduct Preliminary Research

Before refining your research question, conduct preliminary research to familiarize yourself with existing literature and identify gaps, controversies, or unanswered questions within your chosen topic. This step will help you narrow down your focus and ensure that your research question contributes to the existing body of knowledge.

Narrow Down Your Focus

Based on your preliminary research, narrow down your focus to a specific aspect, problem, or issue within your chosen topic. Consider the scope of your study, the availability of resources, and the feasibility of addressing your research question within a reasonable timeframe. Narrowing down your focus will help you formulate a more precise and manageable research question.

Define Key Concepts and Variables

Clearly define the key concepts, variables, or constructs that are central to your research question. This includes identifying the main variables you will be investigating, as well as any relevant theoretical or conceptual frameworks that will guide your study. Clarifying these aspects will ensure that your research question is clear, specific, and focused.

Formulate Your Research Question

Based on your narrowed focus and defined key concepts, formulate your research question. A good research question is concise, specific, and clearly articulated. It should be phrased in a way that is open-ended and leads to further inquiry. Avoid vague or overly broad questions that are difficult to answer or lack clarity.

Consider the Type of Research

Consider whether your research question is best suited for quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research. The type of research question will influence your choice of methodologies, data collection techniques, and analytical approaches. Tailor your research question to align with the goals and requirements of your chosen research paradigm.

Evaluate the Significance and Relevance

Evaluate the significance and relevance of your research question within the context of your academic discipline, field of study, or practical implications. Consider how your research question fills gaps in knowledge, addresses practical problems, or advances theoretical understanding. A good research question should be meaningful and contribute to the broader scholarly conversation.

Refine and Revise

Finally, refine and revise your research question based on feedback from colleagues, advisors, or peers. Consider whether the question is clear, feasible, and likely to yield meaningful results. Be open to making revisions as needed to ensure that your research question is well-constructed and aligned with the goals of your study.

Examples of Research Questions

Below are some example research questions from various fields to provide a glimpse into the diverse array of inquiries within each field.

1. Psychology Research Questions:

• How does childhood trauma influence the development of personality disorders in adulthood?
• What are the effects of mindfulness meditation on reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression?
• How does social media usage impact self-esteem among adolescents?
• What factors contribute to the formation and maintenance of romantic relationships in young adults?
• What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision-making processes in individuals with addiction?
• How does parenting style affect the development of resilience in children?
• What are the long-term effects of early childhood attachment patterns on adult romantic relationships?
• What role does genetics play in the predisposition to mental health disorders such as schizophrenia?
• How does exposure to violent media influence aggressive behavior in children?
• What are the psychological effects of social isolation on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic?

2. Business Research Questions:

• What are the key factors influencing consumer purchasing behavior in the e-commerce industry?
• How does organizational culture impact employee job satisfaction and retention?
• What are the strategies for successful international market entry for small businesses?
• What are the effects of corporate social responsibility initiatives on brand reputation and consumer loyalty?
• How do leadership styles influence organizational innovation and performance?
• What are the challenges and opportunities for implementing sustainable business practices in emerging markets?
• What factors contribute to the success of startups in the technology sector?
• How do economic fluctuations affect consumer confidence and spending behavior?
• What are the impacts of globalization on supply chain management practices?
• What are the determinants of successful mergers and acquisitions in the corporate sector?

3. Education Research Questions:

• What teaching strategies are most effective for promoting student engagement in online learning environments?
• How does socioeconomic status impact academic achievement and educational attainment?
• What are the barriers to inclusive education for students with disabilities?
• What factors influence teacher job satisfaction and retention in urban schools?
• How does parental involvement affect student academic performance and school outcomes?
• What are the effects of early childhood education programs on later academic success?
• How do culturally responsive teaching practices impact student learning outcomes in diverse classrooms?
• What are the best practices for implementing technology integration in K-12 education?
• How do school leadership practices influence school climate and student outcomes?
• What interventions are most effective for addressing the achievement gap in STEM education?

4. Healthcare Research Questions:

• What are the factors influencing healthcare-seeking behavior among underserved populations?
• How does patient-provider communication affect patient satisfaction and treatment adherence?
• What are the barriers to implementing telemedicine services in rural communities?
• What interventions are effective for reducing hospital readmissions among elderly patients?
• How does access to healthcare services impact health disparities among marginalized communities?
• What are the effects of nurse staffing levels on patient outcomes in acute care settings?
• How do socioeconomic factors influence access to mental healthcare services?
• What are the best practices for managing chronic disease patients in primary care settings?
• What are the impacts of healthcare reform policies on healthcare delivery and patient outcomes?
• How does cultural competence training for healthcare providers affect patient trust and satisfaction?

5. Computer Science Research Questions:

• What are the security vulnerabilities of blockchain technology, and how can they be mitigated?
• How can machine learning algorithms be used to detect and prevent cyber-attacks?
• What are the privacy implications of data mining techniques in social media platforms?
• How can artificial intelligence be used to improve medical diagnosis and treatment?
• What are the challenges and opportunities for implementing edge computing in IoT systems?
• How can natural language processing techniques be applied to improve human-computer interaction?
• What are the impacts of algorithmic bias on fairness and equity in decision-making systems?
• How can quantum computing algorithms be optimized for solving complex computational problems?
• What are the ethical considerations surrounding the use of autonomous vehicles in transportation systems?
• How does the design of user interfaces influence user experience and usability in mobile applications?

Create a Compelling Research Question With the Given Examples

Understanding research questions is essential for any successful research endeavor. We’ve explored the various research questions – quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods – each with unique characteristics and purposes.

Through various examples, tips, and strategies, we’ve seen how research questions can be tailored to specific fields of study.

By following these guidelines, we are confident that your research questions will be well-designed, focused, and capable of yielding valuable insights.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some good research question examples.

Good research questions are clear, specific, relevant, and feasible. For example, “How does childhood trauma influence the development of personality disorders in adulthood?”

What are some examples of good and bad research questions?

Good research questions are focused and relevant, such as “What factors influence employee job satisfaction in the hospitality industry?” Bad research questions are vague or trivial, like “What is the favorite color of employees in the hospitality industry?”

Watch: How to Create a Survey Using ProProfs Survey Maker

About the author

Emma David is a seasoned market research professional with 8+ years of experience. Having kick-started her journey in research, she has developed rich expertise in employee engagement, survey creation and administration, and data management. Emma believes in the power of data to shape business performance positively. She continues to help brands and businesses make strategic decisions and improve their market standing through her understanding of research methodologies.

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Research Question Examples 🧑🏻‍🏫

25+ Practical Examples & Ideas To Help You Get Started 

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | October 2023

A well-crafted research question (or set of questions) sets the stage for a robust study and meaningful insights.  But, if you’re new to research, it’s not always clear what exactly constitutes a good research question. In this post, we’ll provide you with clear examples of quality research questions across various disciplines, so that you can approach your research project with confidence!

Research Question Examples

• Psychology research questions
• Business research questions
• Education research questions
• Healthcare research questions
• Computer science research questions

Examples: Psychology

Let’s start by looking at some examples of research questions that you might encounter within the discipline of psychology.

How does sleep quality affect academic performance in university students?

This question is specific to a population (university students) and looks at a direct relationship between sleep and academic performance, both of which are quantifiable and measurable variables.

What factors contribute to the onset of anxiety disorders in adolescents?

The question narrows down the age group and focuses on identifying multiple contributing factors. There are various ways in which it could be approached from a methodological standpoint, including both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Do mindfulness techniques improve emotional well-being?

This is a focused research question aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific intervention.

How does early childhood trauma impact adult relationships?

This research question targets a clear cause-and-effect relationship over a long timescale, making it focused but comprehensive.

Is there a correlation between screen time and depression in teenagers?

This research question focuses on an in-demand current issue and a specific demographic, allowing for a focused investigation. The key variables are clearly stated within the question and can be measured and analysed (i.e., high feasibility).

Examples: Business/Management

Next, let’s look at some examples of well-articulated research questions within the business and management realm.

How do leadership styles impact employee retention?

This is an example of a strong research question because it directly looks at the effect of one variable (leadership styles) on another (employee retention), allowing from a strongly aligned methodological approach.

What role does corporate social responsibility play in consumer choice?

Current and precise, this research question can reveal how social concerns are influencing buying behaviour by way of a qualitative exploration.

Does remote work increase or decrease productivity in tech companies?

Focused on a particular industry and a hot topic, this research question could yield timely, actionable insights that would have high practical value in the real world.

How do economic downturns affect small businesses in the homebuilding industry?

Vital for policy-making, this highly specific research question aims to uncover the challenges faced by small businesses within a certain industry.

Which employee benefits have the greatest impact on job satisfaction?

By being straightforward and specific, answering this research question could provide tangible insights to employers.

Examples: Education

Next, let’s look at some potential research questions within the education, training and development domain.

How does class size affect students’ academic performance in primary schools?

This example research question targets two clearly defined variables, which can be measured and analysed relatively easily.

Do online courses result in better retention of material than traditional courses?

Timely, specific and focused, answering this research question can help inform educational policy and personal choices about learning formats.

What impact do US public school lunches have on student health?

Targeting a specific, well-defined context, the research could lead to direct changes in public health policies.

To what degree does parental involvement improve academic outcomes in secondary education in the Midwest?

This research question focuses on a specific context (secondary education in the Midwest) and has clearly defined constructs.

What are the negative effects of standardised tests on student learning within Oklahoma primary schools?

This research question has a clear focus (negative outcomes) and is narrowed into a very specific context.

Need a helping hand?

Examples: Healthcare

Shifting to a different field, let’s look at some examples of research questions within the healthcare space.

What are the most effective treatments for chronic back pain amongst UK senior males?

Specific and solution-oriented, this research question focuses on clear variables and a well-defined context (senior males within the UK).

How do different healthcare policies affect patient satisfaction in public hospitals in South Africa?

This question is has clearly defined variables and is narrowly focused in terms of context.

Which factors contribute to obesity rates in urban areas within California?

This question is focused yet broad, aiming to reveal several contributing factors for targeted interventions.

Does telemedicine provide the same perceived quality of care as in-person visits for diabetes patients?

Ideal for a qualitative study, this research question explores a single construct (perceived quality of care) within a well-defined sample (diabetes patients).

Which lifestyle factors have the greatest affect on the risk of heart disease?

This research question aims to uncover modifiable factors, offering preventive health recommendations.

Examples: Computer Science

Last but certainly not least, let’s look at a few examples of research questions within the computer science world.

What are the perceived risks of cloud-based storage systems?

Highly relevant in our digital age, this research question would align well with a qualitative interview approach to better understand what users feel the key risks of cloud storage are.

Which factors affect the energy efficiency of data centres in Ohio?

With a clear focus, this research question lays a firm foundation for a quantitative study.

How do TikTok algorithms impact user behaviour amongst new graduates?

While this research question is more open-ended, it could form the basis for a qualitative investigation.

What are the perceived risk and benefits of open-source software software within the web design industry?

Practical and straightforward, the results could guide both developers and end-users in their choices.

Remember, these are just examples…

In this post, we’ve tried to provide a wide range of research question examples to help you get a feel for what research questions look like in practice. That said, it’s important to remember that these are just examples and don’t necessarily equate to good research topics . If you’re still trying to find a topic, check out our topic megalist for inspiration.

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This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

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Think Like a Researcher: Instruction Resources: #6 Developing Successful Research Questions

• Guide Organization
• Overall Summary
• #1 Think Like a Researcher!
• #2 How to Read a Scholarly Article
• #3 Reading for Keywords (CREDO)
• #4 Using Google for Academic Research
• #4 Using Google for Academic Research (Alternate)
• #5 Integrating Sources
• Research Question Discussion
• #7 Avoiding Researcher Bias
• #8 Understanding the Information Cycle
• #9 Exploring Databases
• #10 Library Session
• #11 Post Library Session Activities
• Summary - Readings
• Summary - Research Journal Prompts
• Summary - Key Assignments
• Jigsaw Readings
• Permission Form

Course Learning Outcome:   Develop ability to synthesize and express complex ideas; demonstrate information literacy and be able to work with evidence

Goal:  Develop students’ ability to recognize and create successful research questions

Specifically, students will be able to

• identify the components of a successful research question.
• create a viable research question.

What Makes a Good Research Topic Handout

These handouts are intended to be used as a discussion generator that will help students develop a solid research topic or question. Many students start with topics that are poorly articulated, too broad, unarguable, or are socially insignificant. Each of these problems may result in a topic that is virtually un-researchable. Starting with a researchable topic is critical to writing an effective paper.

Research shows that students are much more invested in writing when they are able to choose their own topics. However, there is also research to support the notion that students are completely overwhelmed and frustrated when they are given complete freedom to write about whatever they choose. Providing some structure or topic themes that allow students to make bounded choices may be a way mitigate these competing realities.

These handouts can be modified or edited for your purposes.  One can be used as a handout for students while the other can serve as a sample answer key.  The document is best used as part of a process.  For instance, perhaps starting with discussing the issues and potential research questions, moving on to problems and social significance but returning to proposals/solutions at a later date.

• Research Questions - Handout Key (2 pgs) This document is a condensed version of "What Makes a Good Research Topic". It serves as a key.
• Research Questions - Handout for Students (2 pgs) This document could be used with a class to discuss sample research questions (are they suitable?) and to have them start thinking about problems, social significance, and solutions for additional sample research questions.
• Research Question Discussion This tab includes materials for introduction students to research question criteria for a problem/solution essay.

Additional Resources

These documents have similarities to those above.  They represent original documents and conversations about research questions from previous TRAIL trainings.

• What Makes a Good Research Topic? - Original Handout (4 pgs)
• What Makes a Good Research Topic? Revised Jan. 2016 (4 pgs)
• What Makes a Good Research Topic? Revised Jan 2016 with comments

Topic Selection (NCSU Libraries)

Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya K. Rodrigues. " Writing from sources, writing from sentences ." Writing & Pedagogy 2.2 (2010): 177-192.

Research Journal

Assign after students have participated in the Developing Successful Research Topics/Questions Lesson OR have drafted a Research Proposal.

Think about your potential research question.

• What is the problem that underlies your question?
• Is the problem of social significance? Explain.
• Is your proposed solution to the problem feasible? Explain.
• Do you think there is evidence to support your solution?

Keys for Writers - Additional Resource

Keys for Writers (Raimes and Miller-Cochran) includes a section to guide students in the formation of an arguable claim (thesis).  The authors advise students to avoid the following since they are not debatable. 

• "a neutral statement, which gives no hint of the writer's position"
• "an announcement of the paper's broad subject"
• "a fact, which is not arguable"
• "a truism (statement that is obviously true)"
• "a personal or religious conviction that cannot be logically debated"
• "an opinion based only on your feelings"
• "a sweeping generalization" (Section 4C, pg. 52)

The book also provides examples and key points (pg. 53) for a good working thesis.

• << Previous: #5 Integrating Sources
• Next: Research Question Discussion >>
• Last Updated: Apr 26, 2024 10:23 AM
• URL: https://libguides.ucmerced.edu/think_like_a_researcher

Influencers on YouTube: a quantitative study on young people’s use and perception of videos about political and societal topics

• Open access
• Published: 18 November 2020
• Volume 41 , pages 6808–6824, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Daniel Zimmermann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3311-4138 1 ,
• Christian Noll 2 ,
• Lars Gräßer 3 ,
• Kai-Uwe Hugger 2 ,
• Lea Marie Braun 2 ,
• Tine Nowak 2 &
• Kai Kaspar 1  

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30 Citations

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The roles of YouTube videos and YouTubers for getting information about political and societal topics are becoming gradually more important to young people. Quantitative research about young people’s use and perception of YouTube-videos and their potential effects on opinion formation is sparse though. This cross-sectional quantitative study addresses this empirical gap. We examined young people’s analytic-critical evaluations of YouTubers and their videos about political and societal topics (YTPS-videos), and how these are affected by the young people’s age and gender. We analysed questionnaire data of 562 participants and divided them into three different age groups. Overall, the participants reported a moderate watching frequency of YTPS-videos. They also rated YTPS-videos as moderately credible and considered specific characteristics of YTPS-videos and their producers as being moderately indicative for fake news. When comparing to traditional TV news, YTPS-videos were perceived as more entertaining, emotional, funny, exciting, modern, and motivating but also as more subjective and manipulating. Regarding YouTubers, the participants ascribed them an important role model function, but criticised them for handling it rather irresponsibly. Concerning opinion formation processes, the participants reported of a rather unimportant role of YTPS-videos for their learning about political and societal topics. They also perceived themselves as less influenceable than other peers and younger people. Still, they prefer talking with friends instead of teachers about YTPS-videos. Age and gender also had effects on various scales. These results deliver essential data for future research and educational measures and opened up unexplored areas in this research field.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Social media is an important information source for young people (Gangadharbatla, Bright, & Logan, 2014 ; Kaspar & Müller-Jensen, 2019 ), and YouTube seems to be especially relevant. Young people consume YouTube-videos to obtain new information and forming their own opinion (Schmidt, Hölig, Merten, & Hasebrink, 2017 ). In this context, the role of YouTube creators and their videos on political and societal topics become gradually more important (Lewis, 2020 ). However, research on how young people use and perceive such videos and how they perceive the potential effects of such videos on their opinion formation is sparse, primarily quantitative approaches. The present study aims to fill this empirical gap by exploring (1) how intensively young people watch YouTuber videos about political and societal topics (YTPS-videos), (2) how young people evaluate YouTube creators (YouTubers) and the content of their videos, (3) how young people perceive their influenceability by YTPS-videos, (4) with whom and via which channels they communicate about the content of YTPS-videos, and (5) how these aspects are affected by young people’s age and gender. Importantly, in the present study, YTPS-videos are not restricted to a specific format (e.g., commentary, interview, report) and cover any kind of news about political or societal events being of potential interest to the audience.

Intensity of YouTube Usage

In April 2020, YouTube had the second-highest number of active users worldwide after Facebook, making it the most popular and most important online video platform to date (Statista, 2020 ). Nearly two-thirds of 12- to 19-year-old German teenagers indicated YouTube as their favourite online platform in 2019 (MPFS, 2020 ), with 90% of them watched videos on YouTube regularly. Similar results were found in Britain (Jiménez, García, & de Ayala, 2016 ) and Israel (Zilka, 2018 ). Also, Zilka ( 2018 ) found significant gender and age effects regarding preferred media content. Consequently, and concerning the present study, the question arises how intensively young people watch YTPS-videos and how this is related to their general YouTube usage intensity, visiting frequency of YouTuber channels as well as gender and age:

How frequently do young people of different age and gender watch YouTube and how intensively do they watch YTPS-videos in particular?

Evaluation of YouTubers and YTPS-Videos

When it comes to the evaluation of YouTubers and the content of YTPS-videos, credibility is one central aspect. Beyond a positive relationship between the perception of media credibility and news consumption (Nelson & Kim, 2020 ), credibility affects the persuasiveness of media content. The Source Credibility Model (cf. Lowry, Wilson, & Haig, 2013 ) emphasises that the source of a message and its perceived expertise and trustworthiness are determinants of the message’s persuasiveness and perceived usefulness, as shown for various scenarios in the context of social media (e.g., Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017 ; Lou & Yuan, 2019 ). Besides, credibility was also found to be positively related to the general liking of YouTuber videos (Xiao, Wang, & Chan-Olmsted, 2018 ). Moreover, the evaluation of the credibility of online information depends on the recipient’s age. For example, college students perceived online information as more credible and verified them more rarely than older adults did (Metzger, Flanagin, & Zwarun, 2003 ). Hence, we examined the following research question concerning YTPS-videos:

How do young people of different age and gender evaluate YTPS-videos’ credibility, how much do they like these videos, and how are these variables correlated with watching frequency?

The Source Credibility Model stresses the importance of the message’s source for its persuasiveness. However, the ‘source’ can refer to both the video and the YouTuber who produces and promotes the video. The question arises which characteristics of YTPS-videos and YouTubers young people use when evaluating credibility aspects and when checking for fake news. This question is particularly important in the context of videos about political and societal topics. Some studies have already examined (non-)credibility in terms of fake news during periods of a political election. Grinberg, Joseph, Friedland, Swire-Thompson, and Lazer ( 2019 ) and Guess, Nagler, and Tucker ( 2019 ) examined the sharing of and exposure to fake news on Twitter and Facebook, respectively, during the 2016 United States presidential campaign. The authors found that mostly conservative, older people were most likely to be engaged in fake news sources.

When it comes to the detection of fake news on social media, previous research often examined characteristics of news content which might be indicative of fake news, such as linguistic- and visual-based content features of news (Shu, Sliva, Wang, Tang, & Liu, 2017 ). However, young people’s strategy to detect fake news is still unclear. A first qualitative study delivered some hints: Hugger et al. ( 2019 ) found that young people’s credibility evaluation of the content of YTPS-videos appears to be strongly interlinked with perceived authenticity of the YouTubers; the perceived authenticity seems to be promoted by perceived individuality and autonomy of the YouTuber but is compromised by an increasing professionality of editorial work and news presentation. The present study hence further explored the characteristics of YTPS-videos that young people use to assess the news’ validity:

Which characteristics of YTPS-videos do young people of different age and gender consider indicative of fake news?

Additionally, young people seem to use traditional TV news as a reference to evaluate the credibility and the news value of YTPS-videos. Hugger et al. ( 2019 ) found that in order to assess the credibility of YouTubers and YTPS-videos, young people at the age of 15 to 16 reported that they compare YouTube with traditional mass media such as TV news, which are perceived as more objective and reliable. The authors speculate that this result may indicate a relatively low ability of young adolescents to analyse and reflect media content critically. In contrast, young adults explicitly perceived the mixing of personal opinions and objective information in mass media more strongly, indicating a significant role of the user’s age on media criticism. Though, it is unclear how this result pattern is quantitatively represented:

How do young people of different age and gender evaluate YTPS-videos compared to traditional TV news?

Besides the video itself, its producer plays a vital role as an information source. Recent research supports this claim: Lou and Yuan ( 2019 ) found influencer’s trustworthiness, attractiveness, and similarity to their followers being factors that positively affect followers’ trust in the messages and postings. Xiao et al. ( 2018 ) found that the trustworthiness and the social influence of YouTubers affect the perceived information credibility on YouTube. Furthermore, Balaban and Mustățea ( 2019 ) showed that attractiveness, trustworthiness, expertise, and similarity are essential factors affecting the perceived information credibility, at least in Romania and Germany. The evaluation of these factors may be additionally moderated by the gender of both the media user and the influencer (Todd & Melancon, 2018 ).

Moreover, recent studies shifted their focus to the perceived role model function of influencers. To put it briefly, recipients tend to identify more with, feel more similar to, and trust influencers more than celebrities (Schouten, Janssen, & Verspaget, 2020 ). In a recent literature review, De Veirman, Hudders, and Nelson ( 2019 ) stressed the importance of influencers as relatable and approachable role models, as children are willing to build (parasocial) relationships and to identify with them, which in turn can lead to the adoption of the influencers’ behaviour and opinion. In contrast, Martínez and Olsson ( 2019 ) showed in their qualitative study that children are capable of critically reflecting upon YouTubers, regarding their celebrity status and commercialisation especially. Interestingly, the degree of reflexivity differed between children. Thus, children do not seem to be a homogenous group when it comes to critical perceptions of YouTubers. Moreover, young people and women tend to have more trust in other people on social media, as compared to older people and men, respectively (Warner-Søderholm et al., 2018 ). Consequently, with regard to young people’s capability of media criticism in the context of YTPS-videos, we asked the following question:

To what extent do young people of different age and gender perceive YouTubers as reliable and responsible role models?

Learning with and Perceived Influenceability by YTPS-Videos

According to the core idea of uses-and-gratification models, people use media to satisfy particular needs such as the need for information and they hence actively link need gratification to media choice. Kaspar and Müller-Jensen ( 2019 ) summarised that uses-and-gratification models “usually assume that media recipients have certain psychological and societal needs (and associated motives), eliciting specific expectations about how mass media can fulfil these needs and leading to corresponding behavioural patterns of media use in order to obtain the desired gratifications at the end” (p. 2). So, it can be assumed that users might watch YTPS-videos specifically for acquiring new information and expand content-specific knowledge. Several studies highlighted the use of YouTube for learning purposes concerning students’ academic learning (Moghavvemi, Sulaiman, Jaafar, & Kasem, 2018 ), teenagers’ knowledge and skill acquisition (Pires, Masanet, & Scolari, 2019 ), and as an informal learning tool for children (Dyosi & Hattingh, 2018 ). Use motives also seem to differ between genders, with men showing more information-seeking intentions when using social networks than women (Krasnova, Veltri, Eling, & Buxmann, 2017 ). Accordingly, we examined the following research question:

How important do young people of different age and gender perceive YTPS-videos for knowledge acquisition about politics and societal topics?

In addition to the purposeful and intentional use of YouTube for knowledge acquisition (RQ3a), it is unclear as yet how young people assess the general potential of YTPS-videos to (unintentionally) influence their opinion formation. In recent years, a similar realm of this process was frequently examined under the terms of dispositional and situational advertising literacy in the field of marketing (Hudders, Cauberghe, & Panic, 2016 ): The ability to critically reflect upon advertising depends on the recipients’ coping skills. These skills thereby include recognising, analysing, and evaluating persuasion attempts as well as choosing an effective coping strategy against them. Interestingly, media literacy seems to improve with age (De Jans, Hudders, & Cauberghe, 2018 ), because older children (ten to eleven years) are better in detecting commercial attempts and brand placements than younger children (seven to eight years) (Hudders & Cauberghe, 2018 ). Besides, eight- to twelve-year-old children did not show the same level of media literacy as 18- to 30-year-old adults (Rozendaal, Buijzen, & Valkenburg, 2010 ). In contrast, results of previous studies show that even older adolescents show engagement in the activities of influencers instead of critically reflecting upon them (van Dam & van Reijmersdal, 2019 ). However, they perceive themselves as capable of understanding advertising and being somewhat resistant to it (De Jans et al., 2018 ).

Furthermore, psychological research in several domains revealed that one’s influenceability by mass media is often perceived as less pronounced than the influenceability of other peers. This phenomenon has been labelled the third-person effect in communication (Davison, 1983 ). The third-person effect describes the persistent phenomenon that people perceive communication effects on others as stronger than on oneself. This phenomenon applies to a variety of communication forms, including social media effects and online news perception (e.g., Banning & Sweetser, 2007 ; Houston, Hansen, & Nisbett, 2011 ; Schweisberger, Billinson, & Chock, 2014 ). We thus expected similar results with respect to YTPS-videos and explored the following question:

How strongly do young people of different age and gender perceive their own as well as other young people’s influenceability by the content of YTPS-videos?

Communication about the Content of YTPS-Videos

Finally, seeking the advice of others is a vital strategy to verify, evaluate and validate online information (Metzger et al., 2003 ). People use interpersonal communication via social media to confirm their own opinion, to obtain personal recommendations, or to orientate themselves by feedback systems (Metzger, Flanagin, & Medders, 2010 ). Thereby, some sources are perceived as more trustworthy than others: People prefer the recommendations and opinions of friends and family. Indeed, online comments of users affect news processing and credibility perception of news content and sources (Duong, Nguyen, & Vu, 2020 ; Waddell, 2018a , 2018b ). Referring to the communication channels, the use of a particular communication channel apparently depends on the type of friend (strong versus weak ties) and the communication subject (school subject versus no school subject) (Van Cleemput, 2010 ). In line with that, when sharing emotions, Flemish adolescents were found to prefer talking face-to-face, followed by texting, calling, and posting on social networks (Vermeulen, Vandebosch, & Heirman, 2018 ). Additionally, males seem to tend to communicate more frequently via public comments on YouTube videos but show less video-sharing behaviour with others than females do (Khan, 2017 ). Therefore, concerning YTPS-videos, we examined with whom and via which channels young people of different age and gender talk about the content of such videos.

With whom do young people of different age and gender communicate about the content of YTPS-videos?

Which channels do young people of different age and gender use to communicate with others about YTPS-videos?

We created both a pencil-paper and an online version of the survey with the software Unipark (Questback, 2017 ). The pencil-paper version was distributed among pupils of cooperating schools and students of a large German university. Written informed consent to participate was provided by the pupils’ legal guardians/next of kin, and all of them participated voluntarily in this study in the context of formal school teaching. An online version of the questionnaire was additionally distributed via specific participant recruitment groups on Facebook in order to reach groups of older people with a serious interest in participating in scientific research. After clicking on the link to open the study, we pointed out that participation in the online survey required a minimum age of 16 years, following the guidelines of the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Parliament (GDPR, 2016 ). We also informed the participants that they could stop the study whenever they want, and that completion of the survey would indicate informed consent. We did not collect any identifying personal data.

Overall 739 participants (577 pencil-paper, 162 online) took part in the survey. We initially excluded 135 participants (18.27%) from the analyses as they reported neither using YouTube in general nor consuming YouTuber videos about political or societal issues (YTPS-videos), further 7 participants (0.95%) for not completing the survey, further 11 participants (1.49%) due to missing data regarding age or gender, further 9 participants (1.22%) for defining their gender as ‘others’, which was an insufficient subsample for the gender-related statistical analyses, and further 15 participants (2.03%) for reporting being older than 35 years. Therefore, the data of 562 participants (440 pencil-paper, 122 online) with 59.07% females were included in the analyses. The mean age was M age  = 18.87 ( SD age  = 4.86). The number of subscribed YouTube channels reported by these participants showed a median of 10. At the time of the survey, 55.0% of the participants were pupils of secondary schools, 40.2% were students of a University, and 4.8% attended neither of these. We divided participants into three different age groups to examine age effects: Participants who were under the age of 16 and therefore not authorized by law to vote in Germany ( n  = 205, 48.29% female; M age  = 14.39, SD age  = 0.64), young people from 16 to 20 years of age ( n  = 156, 62.18% female; M age  = 17.64, SD age  = 1.66), and participants older than 20 years of age (range from 21 to 35 years) and therefore legally get full criminal responsibility as an adult in Germany ( n  = 201, 67.66% female; M age  = 24.39, SD age  = 3.34). The number of participants slightly varied across the analyses due to occasional missing data.

Questionnaire

The introduction of the survey included our definitions of the terms “YouTuber” and their “YTPS-videos”. We defined YouTubers as people who run their own YouTube channel and upload regularly or irregularly self-produced videos on YouTube. Thus, we clarified that the survey is not about videos produced by professional news broadcasters that additionally disseminate their news via YouTube. We defined YTPS-videos as videos of any kind of format addressing political or societal topics.

We initially asked the participants to indicate a few demographical information: age, gender, school, previous graduation (if they already had one), and their occupational status (if they were not attending any school). If not stated otherwise, each of the following questions was answered on a 5-point rating scale ranging from 1 (“not at all” or “never”) to 5 (“very much” or “very often”).

First, we assessed participants’ YouTube usage intensity. We asked them how intensively they use YouTube in general, how frequently they watch YTPS-videos, and how frequently they visit YouTuber channels on a 6-point scale (1 = “every day”, 2 = “every week, but not every day”, 3 = “every month, but not every week”, 4 = “every year, but not every month”, 5 = “less than once a year”, 6 = “never”), see Table 1 .

Second, we assessed participants’ evaluation of the credibility of YouTubers and their videos. As shown in Table 1 , we asked them to estimate the credibility of YTPS-videos in general, how much they appreciate it when YouTubers present their own opinion in their YTPS-videos, and to evaluate their personal liking of YTPS-videos in general (−2 = “very negative”, 0 = “neutral”, +2 = “very positive”). Furthermore, the participants rated several characteristics of YouTubers and their videos they potentially regard as indicative of Fake News (1 = “no indicator at all”, 3 = “medium indicator”, 5 = “very strong indicator”). The full list of evaluated characteristics can be seen in Table 1 .

Third, participants compared YTPS-videos with classic TV news. To do so, they assessed 20 characteristics whether these apply rather to YTPS-videos or to TV news (1 = “applies much more to YTPS-videos”, 3 = “applies equally to both formats”, 5 = “applies much more to TV news”). Importantly, numeric markers were introduced for the analyses but were not shown to the participants in order not to bias their ratings. We only presented the verbal markers to the participants. The full list of evaluated characteristics is presented in Table 2 .

Fourth, we assessed participants’ learning and perceived influenceability by YTPS-videos. On the one hand, participants rated the importance of YTPS-videos for their learning about politics and societal topics. We asked them how important YTPS-videos are to them as a source of information, how much they learn by watching such videos, and how strongly they use the content of YTPS-videos for their opinion formation. We calculated a mean score across these items (Cronbach’s α = .811). On the other hand, participants assessed how strongly they let themselves be influenced by YTPS-videos and to what extent other people of the same age, younger people, and older people are influenced by such videos.

Fifth, we assessed the extent to which YouTubers are perceived as role models. Participants rated several items regarding their perception of YouTubers’ role model function. The full list of items is presented in Table 3 .

Finally, we examined participants’ communication about the content of YTPS-videos. Participants rated the frequency of talking with certain communication partners and the communication channels they use. The full list of communication partners and channels is presented in Table 4 .

All analyses were conducted using SPSS 27. In order to quantify the extent of participants’ evaluations of YouTubers and YTPS-videos as below-average, average, or above-average compared to the scale’s midpoint, we conducted one-sample t -tests. We analysed possible main and interaction effects of age group (< 16 years, 16–20 years, > 20) and gender using 3 × 2 ANOVAs. In case of a significant main effect of age group, we performed pairwise comparisons (Bonferroni-corrected familywise error rate). All tables display the means and standard deviations for age and gender groups, indicate the results of the one-sample t -tests, and present the results of the ANOVAs including pairwise comparisons for age groups. Moreover, due to multiple testing and accumulated Type I error, we further report Bonferroni-adjusted significance levels for each set of t -tests and each set of ANOVAs associated with a research question. However, due to the explorative nature of the present study and because several authors have already pointed out that the Bonferroni method is unnecessarily conservative in case of many tests and hence increases the false-negative rate (e.g., Jafari & Ansari-Pour, 2019 ; Lee & Lee, 2018 ), we also discuss effects being significant only in the case of unadjusted significance levels. As the results are the first of its kind, applying a stricter criterion could otherwise obscure essential effects. Nevertheless, we additionally indicate the more conservative (adjusted) significance levels in the tables and figure for transparency reasons.

YouTube Watching Habits (RQ1)

As shown by Table 1 , the general YouTube usage intensity was consistently rated as above average across age groups and genders. Visiting frequency of YouTuber channels was consistently under the scale’s midpoint, indicating an above-average frequency due to reversed item coding (1 = “every day”, 6 = “never”). The watching frequency of YTPS-videos was stated to be either average or below average across groups. Besides, males reported a higher general usage intensity of YouTube, a higher visiting frequency of YouTube channels, and a higher watching frequency of YTPS-videos. The 16- to 20-year-old participants stated a higher usage intensity of YouTube compared to the other two age groups. The over-20-years-old group stated a lower visiting frequency of YouTuber channels than the other two groups (reversed coding) but reported to watch YTPS-videos more frequently than the under-16-year-old group. Since the scale measuring the visiting frequency of YouTuber channels was rather ordinal level, we also performed non-parametric analyses that verified the parametric results reported in Table 1 .

Evaluation of YTPS-Videos and Fake News Indicators (RQ2a, RQ2b)

Only the under-16-year-old males evaluated the credibility of YTPS-videos above average (see Table 1 ), whereas each of the other groups rated the credibility as either average or below average (RQ2a). The appreciation of the presentation of YouTubers’ own opinion in YTPS-videos was average or above average, while the liking of YTPS-videos was rated as above average (scale’s midpoint was zero). The over-20-year-old evaluated YTPS-videos as less credible and reported a lower appreciation of YouTubers’ own opinion than both younger age groups. Further, they stated a lower liking of YTPS-videos than the 16- to 20-year-old group. There was no effect of gender. Additionally, we found significant positive correlations between the credibility evaluation and the watching frequency of YTPS-videos for over-20-year-old males, r  = .283, p  = .023, and females, r  = .287, p  < .001. There were no significant correlations in the other age groups regardless of gender, all r s ≤ .194, p s ≥ .057. Besides, we found significant positive correlations between the credibility evaluation and the appreciation of the presentation of YouTubers’ own opinion in all groups, with the highest values for over-20-year-old males, r  = .406, p  < .001, and females, r  = .331, p  < .001. Except for 16- to 20-year-old males, we also found significant positive correlations between the credibility evaluation and liking of YTPS-videos in all groups, with the highest expression for over-20-year-old males, r  = .374, p  = .002, and females, r  = .480, p  < .001.

Regarding characteristics of YouTubers and their videos considered as potentially indicative of fake news (RQ2b), most mean ratings were average or below average (see Table 1 ). As an exception, the citation of information sources was considered as indicative above average by over-20-year-old males and females. The extent of visible commercialisation of YTPS-videos was considered as indicative above average by under-16-year-old males as well as by 16- to 20-year-old and over-20-year-old females. The ANOVAs did not find differences between males and females, but some main effects of age group: The under-16-year-old group rated the YouTubers’ language style as a less strong indicator than the 16- to 20-year-old group. Concerning the citation of information sources, YouTubers’ attempt to be a role model, and the extent of personal advice given by the YouTubers, the under-16-year-old group perceived them as less strong indicators of fake news than the over-20-year-old group did. Furthermore, we found an interaction between age and gender regarding the extent to which YouTubers’ express their own opinion in YTPS-videos: Females showed a higher rating than males in the group of the under-16-year-old group, t (202) = 2.76, p  = .006, d  = 0.386, whereas no gender difference was found in the other two age groups. There was also an interaction effect between age and gender relating to the extent of visible commercialisation in YTPS-videos, as females showed a higher rating than males only in the 16- to 20-year-old group, t (149) = 2.03, p  = .044, d  = 0.343.

YTPS-Videos Versus TV News (RQ2c)

Participants rated whether several characteristics apply rather to YTPS-videos or traditional TV news (RQ2c), see Table 2 . Ratings that significantly differed from 3 indicate that the corresponding characteristic was attributed more to YouTuber news (below 3) or more to TV news (above 3). Overall, TV news was seen as more objective, facts-oriented, informative, boring, credible, neutral, reputable, and professional, independently of participants’ age and gender. In contrast, YTPS-videos were generally seen as more subjective, opinion-oriented, entertaining, emotional, funny, exciting, modern, motivating, and manipulative. Both formats were rated as equally interesting. The characteristics “compact” and “exhausting” were equally attributed to both news formats or rather to TV news, depending on age and gender. Moreover, the ANOVAs revealed some main effects of gender and age group: In contrast to male participants, female participants rated TV news as more objective, facts-oriented, informative, exciting, credible, neutral, reputable, and compact, but they rated YTPS-videos as more subjective, opinion-oriented, emotional and manipulative. Regarding age, the over-20-year-old group rated YTPS-videos as less opinion-oriented, entertaining, and motivating than the other two age groups, but they also rated TV news as less neutral. Besides, they also perceived YTPS-videos as less exciting than the 16–20-year-old group, and as less manipulative than the under-16-year-old group. At last, they rated TV news as less exhausting compared to the under-16-year-old group. There was no interaction effect between age and gender on any of the characteristic ratings.

YouTubers as Role Models (RQ2d)

According to participants’ perception, YouTubers have a role model function, are important as role models, are aware of their role model function and their influence on viewers, and they are similar to music and movie stars regarding their role model function (see Table 3 ). Corresponding ratings showed an at least average mean value in all genders and age groups (with one exception). In contrast, participants rather denied that YouTubers show responsible handling of their role model function. Moreover, females perceived a greater role model function of YouTubers than males did. Regarding age effects, the under-16-year-old group perceived a weaker role model function but better responsible handling than the 16- to 20-year-old group. Finally, the perceived importance of YouTubers as role models and their similarity to music and movie stars significantly increased from age group to age group.

Learning and Influenceability (RQ3a, RQ3b)

Regarding the importance of YTPS-videos for participants’ learning about politics and societal topics (RQ3a), we found below-average ratings independently of age and gender, all t s ≤ −2.72, p s ≤ .009, d s ≤ −.354 (adjusted significance level p  = .0083). However, YTPS-videos were rated as more important for learning by male participants ( M  = 2.56, SD  = 0.91) than by female participants ( M  = 2.33, SD  = 0.93), F (1, 556) = 7.28, p  = .007, η p 2  = .013. There were no further main or interaction effects, all F s ≤ 2.59, p s ≥ .076, η p 2  ≤ .009.

Regarding the perceived influenceability by YTPS-videos (RQ3b), Fig.  1 shows participants’ assessments of how strongly they let themselves be influenced and to what extent other people of the same age, younger people, and older people are presumed to be influenceable by such videos. Males and females in all age groups consistently perceived their own and older people’s influenceability as below average, whereas younger persons’ influenceability was consistently rated as above average. In contrast, the three age groups perceived a different influenceability of other people of the same age (i.e., other peers): The under-16-year-old males, the over-20-years-old males, and 16- to 20-years-old females rated them as averagely influenceable. The over-20-year-old females reported a below-average rating, and the other two groups an above-average rating. Next, we extended our usual two-way ANOVA to a 3 (age group) × 2 (gender) × 4 (valuation subject) ANOVA with valuation subject as a within-subject factor (self vs. other people of same age vs. younger people vs. older people) and perceived influenceability by YTPS-videos as dependent variable. We also calculated Bonferroni-adjusted pairwise comparisons in case of a significant main effect of valuation subject. We found a main effect of valuation subject, F (2.64, 1459.50) = 894.23, p  < .001, η p 2  = .618: The participants perceived themselves and older people as less influenceable than younger people and people of the same age. Besides, the influenceability of younger people was rated higher than that of people of the same age. We found a main effect of age group, F (2, 552) = 5.32, p  = .005, η p 2  = .019: The over-20-year-old group estimated people’s influenceability lower than the other two age groups. However, we also found an interaction between age group and valuation subject, F (5.29, 1459.50) = 4.17, p  < .001, η p 2  = .015: The effect of age group was only significant regarding the evaluation of other people of the same age, F (2, 556) = 14.50, p  < .001, η p 2  = .050.

Participants’ assessments of the influenceability of themselves, other peers, younger persons, and older persons by YTPS-videos. Vertical lines indicate the standard error of the mean. Asterisks indicate the results of one-sample t -tests against the scales’ midpoint of 3. 1 The respective test result is not significant when applying the Bonferroni-adjusted significance level ( p  = .002) to the set of t -tests

Communication about YTPS-Videos (RQ4a, RQ4b)

Concerning the participants’ communication partners regarding the content of YTPS-videos (RQ4a), we found that participants of both genders and all age groups reported a below-average communication frequency with the presented communication partners, but preferred communicating with their friends instead of teachers, see Table 4 . The ANOVAs revealed that males communicated more often with friends and classmates. Furthermore, the over-20-year-old group talked with their family members (including parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents) less often about the content of YTPS-videos than the younger age groups did. We additionally found two interactions between age group and gender: In the 16- to 20-year-old group, males communicated more often with their family than females did, t (153) = 2.35, p  = .020, d  = .390. Furthermore, males communicated more often with their friends than females in the under-16-year-old group, t (192.31) = 2.36, p  = .019, d  = .328, and in the 16–20-year-old group, t (154) = 22.19, p  = .030, d  = .362.

In terms of the communication channels the participants use when communicating about the content of YTPS-videos (RQ4b), face-to-face communication was the most preferred modus, see Table 4 . All other channels were used relatively rarely. We found several main effects of gender and age group, but no interactions: Males, compared to females, communicated more frequently via YouTube comments, Facebook’s news feed, E-Mail, Skype, and face-to-face. The over-20-year-old group used the Facebook’s news feed and phone calls more often, but they communicated via Snapchat and Instagram less frequently about the content of YTPS-videos than the other two age groups. Also, the over-20-year-old group communicated via E-Mail and Skype more often than the under-16-year-old group. Additionally, the 16- to 20-year-old group talked face-to-face more frequently compared to the other two age groups.

The present study examined the role of YTPS-videos and YouTubers for young people’s opinion formation on political and societal topics.

First, we found that young people reported a generally high YouTube usage intensity and a moderate watching frequency of YTPS-videos (RQ1), indicating that YouTube was an important information source in our sample. While general usage intensity was exceptionally high in the 16- to 20-year-old group, the over-20-year-old group less often visited YouTube channels but showed an even higher watching frequency of YTPS-videos compared to the under-16-year-old group. Notably, males reported an overall higher YouTube consumption.

Second, participants’ responses reflected some critical perceptions of YTPS-videos and YouTubers, as already found in other subject areas (Martínez & Olsson, 2019 ). Though the liking of YTPS-videos was relatively high, participants perceived them as only moderately credible (RQ2a). The over-20-year-old evaluated YTPS-videos as less credible and reported a lower appreciation of YouTubers’ own opinion than both younger age groups. Further, they stated a lower liking of YTPS-videos than the 16- to 20-year-old group. These results indicate that young people’s critical perception of YTPS-videos increases with age, while there was no effect of gender. Interestingly, credibility evaluation was positively correlated with viewing frequency in the oldest age group. Also, we found positive correlations between the credibility evaluation and the appreciation of the presentation of YouTubers’ own opinion in all groups, but the highest correlations were found in the over-20-year-old group. Hence, credibility seems to become a more critical factor for consumption frequency and media acceptance with increasing age, supporting previous findings (Nelson & Kim, 2020 ).

Third, participants moderately agreed to all characteristics of YTPS-videos and their producers as being indicative of fake news (RQ2b). This result also considerably varied between age groups. Again, the over-20-year-old group appeared to be more critical than the under-16-year-old group regarding the citation of information sources, YouTubers’ attempt to be a role model, and the extent of personal advice given by the YouTubers. Gender differences were negligible. Very young people may struggle with the evaluation of online news as already observed in previous studies (Flanagin & Metzger, 2000 ; McGrew, Breakstone, Ortega, Smith, & Wineburg, 2018 ; Metzger et al., 2003 ; Nee, 2019 ). This would also underline the importance of a tool for reconnaissance to improve media criticism in the context of fake news on YouTube, as it was suggested by McGrew et al. ( 2018 ). Young people could also refer to other characteristics than those addressed in the present study and previously reported by Hugger et al. ( 2019 ), for example design, graphics, and multimedia content (Agosto, 2002 ; Shenton & Dixon, 2004 ; Wobbrock, Hsu, Burger, & Magee, 2019 ).

Fourth, we found a very pronounced difference in participants’ evaluation of YTPS-videos compared to traditional TV news (RQ2c). The latter was perceived as more objective, facts-oriented, informative, credible, neutral, reputable, and professional but also more boring, independently of participants’ age and gender. In contrast, YTPS-videos were generally seen as more entertaining, emotional, funny, exciting, modern, motivating, but also more subjective, opinion-oriented, and manipulative than traditional TV news, independently of age and gender. This result pattern is compatible with the findings of Elvestad, Phillips, and Feuerstein ( 2017 ) who surveyed students from Israel, Norway, and the United Kingdom, all reporting higher trust in traditional news media than in social media. Such results may reflect a critical perception or even scepticism of YTPS-news on the one hand. On the other hand, it also indicates a rather uncritical perception of TV news and only a little critical reflection on traditional journalism processes. With respect to age, we found that the over-20-year-old group showed a more balanced comparison between traditional TV news and YTPS-news. Surprisingly, female participants, compared to male participants, rated TV news as more objective, facts-oriented, informative, exciting, credible, neutral, reputable, and compact, and they rated YTPS-videos as more subjective, opinion-oriented, emotional, and manipulative. We may speculate that this result pattern either shows a higher capacity for media criticism in young females or a greater orientation towards supposedly valid media standards. Future research should disentangle these possibilities in more detail.

Fifth, participants ascribed YouTubers an important role model function and a high awareness of their influence, independently of gender and age (RQ2d). In addition, they criticised YouTubers’ rather irresponsible handling of their role model function. The perceived importance of YouTubers as role models and their similarity to music and movie stars increased from age group to age group. De Veirman et al. ( 2019 ) already stressed the importance of influencers as relatable and approachable role models as children are willing to build (parasocial) relationships and to identify with them. Thus, this is a critical mixture. On the one hand, YouTubers are vital role models, but in contrast to traditional celebrities, the perceived distance is less pronounced, increasing their potential effects on the young audience. As found by Schouten et al. ( 2020 ), recipients tend to identify more with, feel more similar to, and trust influencers more compared to celebrities. Interestingly, participants of the present study, independently of age and gender, also assumed that YouTubers would be only moderately aware of their role model function. To sum up, the participants seem to (partially) understand and critically reflect on the YouTubers’ roles and potential effects.

Sixth, the participants reported that YTPS-videos are relatively unimportant for their learning about politics and societal topics, but YTPS-videos were rated as more important for learning by male participants than by female participants (RQ3a). Therefore, purposeful and intentional use of YouTube for the acquisition of political and societal knowledge appears not prevalent. It would be interesting to see whether there are nonetheless learning gains by consumption. Indeed, unintentional learning has already been shown in experimental settings (e.g., Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012 ). Also, are there differences in knowledge between males versus females? It would be an interesting direction for future research to combine YouTube consumption with objective measures of knowledge performance.

Seventh, young people consistently perceived themselves as less influenceable than younger people and same-aged people, and as influenceable as older people (RQ3b). Young people seem to perceive themselves as relatively resistant to the influences of YTPS-video content, although they are aware of the YTPS-videos’ manipulative potential. This finding is supported by previous research focusing on influencer marketing on YouTube, which came to similar results (Coates, Hardman, Halford, Christiansen, & Boyland, 2020 ). Also, the fact that participants perceived themselves as significantly less influenceable by mass media than younger and same-aged people is consistent with the well-known third-person effect (Davison, 1983 ) and previous findings in the context of social media and online news (Houston et al., 2011 ; Schweisberger et al., 2014 ). Consequently, they overestimate their resistance or underestimate that of other people.

Finally, we found that participants of both genders and all age groups reported a below-average communication frequency about the content of YTPS-videos with usual communication partners, but preferred communicating with their friends instead of teachers (RQ4a). That result is crucial as it indicates that a critical debriefing and analysis of the consumed content elude the formal educational contexts in school, which might have a corrective effect on political education processes. A possible explanation could be that the roles of parents and teachers concerning online activities decrease with age during adolescence, while the one of peers increases. This circumstance has already been shown by previous studies in the context of teenagers’ engagement in online risks (Shin & Lwin, 2017 ). Another reason could be that parents and teachers do not provide the appropriate room for discussions about YTPS-videos. At the same time, face-to-face communication was the most preferred modus when communicating about the content of YTPS-videos (RQ4b). This result may be interpreted as promising because this form of communication provides an appropriate basis for discussing complex issues. In contrast, some communication technologies suffer from information transfer capacities (Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987 ) and may additionally be associated with critical data security issues.

Practical Implications and Future Research

The results allow us to conclude about media education of young people at school. Young people do not seem to discuss the topics of YTPS-videos with their teachers in school often. One possible question which arises in this context is whether school plays a role at all when it comes to the consumption of, discussion about, and critical reflection on YTPS-videos. It could be difficult for schools and teachers to address such private and niched consumption adequately. Media psychological research may help to disentangle the situational and personal obstacles counteracting the desirable discussion and comparison of individual standpoints. Importantly, social media platforms such as YouTube and the topic of fake news have already been included in course syllabi and are nothing new to be inserted into classroom teaching. However, the critical question is how these topics can be addressed in formal education in an appropriate and target group-oriented manner. The present results indicate that formats focusing on peer-to-peer communication might be the key to success. It is also unclear to what extent teachers actually make this content the subject of instruction and whether students are willing to talk about such content. Content of YTPS-videos might be considered sensitive and thus requires specific methods facilitating the discussion of sensitive topics with young people (e.g., Hoppe, Wells, Morrison, Gillmore, & Wilsdon, 1995 ). It should be noted that nowadays school curricula already include media literacy as a learning aim, but the approaches vary a lot between different schools and countries (Zhang, Zhang, & Wang, 2020 ). For example, in Germany, where the present study took place, no centralised, standardised policy for media literacy exist. Thus, the critical question is how specific content of new media, such as YTPS-videos, can be integrated into formal education settings so that this creates added value for students. Psychological research can help to systematically examine the effects of media-based learning formats, as recently shown in the context of commercial video games (e.g., Rüth & Kaspar, 2020 ).

Besides, the implications of the third-person effect could be addressed pedagogically. From a user-oriented perspective, an underestimation of one’s own influenceability appears more problematic than an overestimation of other people’s influenceability by mass media. Because persuasive effects of influencers on young people are evident (e.g., De Veirman et al., 2019 ; Dehghani, Niaki, Ramezani, & Sali, 2016 ; Sokolova & Kefi, 2020 ), such an underestimation could increase young people’s vulnerability to persuasive attempts of YTPS-videos. One possible countermeasure could be the discussion with teachers in class. Teachers could help to pinpoint the relevance of political and societal topics presented in the YTPS-videos for the young people. As Schweisberger et al. ( 2014 ) showed, the perceived effects of news stories on oneself are higher for relevant news compared to non-relevant ones. Additionally, the authors found that the third-person effect seems to be smaller for high-relevant topics. Thus, pinpointing the relevance of news for young people could raise awareness for the persuasive effects of YTPS-video content. Furthermore, teachers could explain the effects of social media and influencers on young people as well as the implications of the third-person-effect. Such educational measures might significantly improve young people’s media literacy. However, we have to emphasise that our results do not provide any information on whether the third-person effect reflects young people’s underestimation of their influenceability. Davison ( 1983 ) alternatively stated, “that people will tend to overestimate the influence that mass communications have on the attitudes and behavior of others” (p. 3). In accordance, Sun, Pan, and Shen ( 2008 ) showed that third-person effects in terms of the perceived self–other asymmetry are larger when others are perceived as particularly vulnerable. This finding could indicate that the third-person effect instead represents an overestimation of the influenceability of others. Also, only small and inconsistent relations between the third-person effect and behavioural intentions were found (Xu & Gonzenbach, 2008 ). As a result, the question arises whether the third-person effect found in the present study is of practical relevance at all. This question should be clarified by future research before addressing the third-person effect pedagogically in school. Alarming claims of effects that do not exist should be avoided in the context of media literacy education.

Our findings also form the basis for future quantitative studies. We provide first quantitative results about young people’s use and critical reflection of YTPS-videos. These results may facilitate deriving and testing concrete hypotheses, but our results also open new directions for further research topics. Indeed, research on the role of YTPS-videos on young people’s opinion formation regarding political and societal topics has been widely neglected so far but appears very important given the high relevance of this medium for the young generation. Besides, we found first and strong evidence for gender and age differences in the use and evaluation of YTPS-videos. Future research should consider such differential effects and may also include personality traits. Also, what are the antecedents and consequences of such gender effects regarding media consumption, education, and political orientation? Temporal changes in media literacy are also conceivable. Up to now, no longitudinal studies are addressing this. Such studies could clarify whether the age differences found in the present study represent truly longitudinal changes or indicate cohort effects. Finally, the findings also deliver first implications and relevant aspects for the development and testing of educational programmes. Based on our results, such educational programmes could address, for example, methods to verify YTPS-news and online information, persuasive attempts of such videos, as well as the critical reflection of users’ behaviour and attitudes regarding YTPS-videos to foster media literacy.

Limitations and Prospects for Future Research

There are some more limitations of the present study which should be considered when interpreting the results above. First, we developed our research topics mainly based on research from other subject areas and several older studies due to a lack of thematically more specific research. As a consequence, this study was mainly explorative. In addition, we were also not able to use established and validated instruments. As YouTube and YTPS-videos as a platform for information gathering become more and more important, it would be desirable to develop validated multi-item scales to assess the specific aspects examined here. In this way, the constructs, their relationships, their factorial structure, and their construct validity can be researched in more detail. The present study may provide the first basis for such projects. It should also be noted that few results become not significant when applying a more conservative, Bonferroni-adjusted significant level.

Moreover, we investigated pupils from a high school and university students with a relatively high educational background in Germany. Besides, as participation in this study was voluntary and the online version was distributed via specific social media groups, the degree of a potential sample bias cannot be finally estimated. In each case, the sample was rather homogenous. There is evidence that the ability for media criticism varies between schools: For example, Hu and Kurokami ( 2017 ) found differences in media literacy between pupils of an urban and of a rural middle school in China. Pupils of the urban middle school showed, among other things, higher critical thinking skills. The authors mainly attributed this to the missing curriculum and opportunities to explore and learn the appropriate media use in rural middle schools. A further aspect of this context of learning opportunities is that media criticism seems to be taught mainly within higher education. Schmidt ( 2013 ) examined how media literacy is addressed in different levels of the educational system in the US. The author found that media literacy is most often addressed in higher education like university and college compared to earlier school forms like Middle or High School. Consequently, the results in the present study could be different when investigating young people who attend a school form at another educational level. Further, as media literacy issues are mainly addressed in higher education, the higher media literacy skills of our older age group could simply reflect a higher number of passed learning opportunities. Consequently, future research on media literacy regarding YTPS-videos has to take school form and educational background into account.

Finally, in contrast to other accounts (e.g., Martínez & Olsson, 2019 ), the present study did not focus on the perception of a specific YouTuber and their videos. We did not specify the source of the YTPS-videos consumed by the participants. As the reported number of subscribed channels showed a median of 10 in the present study, participants’ responses refer to a rather general impression of YouTubers and YTPS-videos. The present data thus provide a generalised picture that lays the foundation for more differentiated studies in the future. For example, as Lewis ( 2020 ) showed, some YouTubers rather represent more extreme and reactionary political standpoints by sensationalising mainstream news. As a result, the perception and evaluation of YouTubers and YTPS-videos could vary, depending on how the YouTubers’ political orientations are perceived and how they match with the orientation of the individual consumer. Indeed, perceived similarity with an influencer can have positive effects on consumers’ trust in influencer postings and on behavioural intentions (e.g., Lou & Yuan, 2019 ). Additionally, the political orientation could be more pronounced with increasing age. As a consequence, political orientations of both the consumer and the YouTuber become more relevant with increasing age. Also, the specific attributes of the videos might act as a moderator on perception effects. In the present study, we purposefully covered a vast range of YTPS-videos that was neither limited to specific political or societal topics nor to a specific video format. In general, it is conceivable that the perception of YTPS-videos varies across topics, genres, contents, stylistic choices, viewer groups, report types, and commercial ties of the YouTubers. For example, we found that commercialisation seems to be a relevant aspect for young people when evaluating YTPS-videos. This could in turn influence the persuasiveness of the video content. Future research should disentangle the contribution of specific attributes of YTPS-videos on young people’s perception.

To conclude, the present study was one first attempt to bridge a vital research gap regarding young people’s analytic-critical perception and evaluation of YouTubers and YTPS-videos. We found significant age and gender effects and a complex result pattern highlighting implications for both future research and educational measures. This study provides a substantial basis for a better understanding of how young people perceive and evaluate media content, media producers, and their role in the media consumption process.

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study, as well as the used materials, are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work was partly funded by the Federal State Government of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW, Germany) via the Grimme Research College (Project: YouTuber and Peers/2017–2018).

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Zimmermann, D., Noll, C., Gräßer, L. et al. Influencers on YouTube: a quantitative study on young people’s use and perception of videos about political and societal topics. Curr Psychol 41 , 6808–6824 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01164-7

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Research questions, hypotheses and objectives

Patricia farrugia.

* Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, the

Bradley A. Petrisor

† Division of Orthopaedic Surgery and the

Forough Farrokhyar

‡ Departments of Surgery and

§ Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont

Mohit Bhandari

There is an increasing familiarity with the principles of evidence-based medicine in the surgical community. As surgeons become more aware of the hierarchy of evidence, grades of recommendations and the principles of critical appraisal, they develop an increasing familiarity with research design. Surgeons and clinicians are looking more and more to the literature and clinical trials to guide their practice; as such, it is becoming a responsibility of the clinical research community to attempt to answer questions that are not only well thought out but also clinically relevant. The development of the research question, including a supportive hypothesis and objectives, is a necessary key step in producing clinically relevant results to be used in evidence-based practice. A well-defined and specific research question is more likely to help guide us in making decisions about study design and population and subsequently what data will be collected and analyzed. 1

Objectives of this article

In this article, we discuss important considerations in the development of a research question and hypothesis and in defining objectives for research. By the end of this article, the reader will be able to appreciate the significance of constructing a good research question and developing hypotheses and research objectives for the successful design of a research study. The following article is divided into 3 sections: research question, research hypothesis and research objectives.

Research question

Interest in a particular topic usually begins the research process, but it is the familiarity with the subject that helps define an appropriate research question for a study. 1 Questions then arise out of a perceived knowledge deficit within a subject area or field of study. 2 Indeed, Haynes suggests that it is important to know “where the boundary between current knowledge and ignorance lies.” 1 The challenge in developing an appropriate research question is in determining which clinical uncertainties could or should be studied and also rationalizing the need for their investigation.

Increasing one’s knowledge about the subject of interest can be accomplished in many ways. Appropriate methods include systematically searching the literature, in-depth interviews and focus groups with patients (and proxies) and interviews with experts in the field. In addition, awareness of current trends and technological advances can assist with the development of research questions. 2 It is imperative to understand what has been studied about a topic to date in order to further the knowledge that has been previously gathered on a topic. Indeed, some granting institutions (e.g., Canadian Institute for Health Research) encourage applicants to conduct a systematic review of the available evidence if a recent review does not already exist and preferably a pilot or feasibility study before applying for a grant for a full trial.

In-depth knowledge about a subject may generate a number of questions. It then becomes necessary to ask whether these questions can be answered through one study or if more than one study needed. 1 Additional research questions can be developed, but several basic principles should be taken into consideration. 1 All questions, primary and secondary, should be developed at the beginning and planning stages of a study. Any additional questions should never compromise the primary question because it is the primary research question that forms the basis of the hypothesis and study objectives. It must be kept in mind that within the scope of one study, the presence of a number of research questions will affect and potentially increase the complexity of both the study design and subsequent statistical analyses, not to mention the actual feasibility of answering every question. 1 A sensible strategy is to establish a single primary research question around which to focus the study plan. 3 In a study, the primary research question should be clearly stated at the end of the introduction of the grant proposal, and it usually specifies the population to be studied, the intervention to be implemented and other circumstantial factors. 4

Hulley and colleagues 2 have suggested the use of the FINER criteria in the development of a good research question ( Box 1 ). The FINER criteria highlight useful points that may increase the chances of developing a successful research project. A good research question should specify the population of interest, be of interest to the scientific community and potentially to the public, have clinical relevance and further current knowledge in the field (and of course be compliant with the standards of ethical boards and national research standards).

FINER criteria for a good research question

Adapted with permission from Wolters Kluwer Health. 2

Whereas the FINER criteria outline the important aspects of the question in general, a useful format to use in the development of a specific research question is the PICO format — consider the population (P) of interest, the intervention (I) being studied, the comparison (C) group (or to what is the intervention being compared) and the outcome of interest (O). 3 , 5 , 6 Often timing (T) is added to PICO ( Box 2 ) — that is, “Over what time frame will the study take place?” 1 The PICOT approach helps generate a question that aids in constructing the framework of the study and subsequently in protocol development by alluding to the inclusion and exclusion criteria and identifying the groups of patients to be included. Knowing the specific population of interest, intervention (and comparator) and outcome of interest may also help the researcher identify an appropriate outcome measurement tool. 7 The more defined the population of interest, and thus the more stringent the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the greater the effect on the interpretation and subsequent applicability and generalizability of the research findings. 1 , 2 A restricted study population (and exclusion criteria) may limit bias and increase the internal validity of the study; however, this approach will limit external validity of the study and, thus, the generalizability of the findings to the practical clinical setting. Conversely, a broadly defined study population and inclusion criteria may be representative of practical clinical practice but may increase bias and reduce the internal validity of the study.

PICOT criteria 1

A poorly devised research question may affect the choice of study design, potentially lead to futile situations and, thus, hamper the chance of determining anything of clinical significance, which will then affect the potential for publication. Without devoting appropriate resources to developing the research question, the quality of the study and subsequent results may be compromised. During the initial stages of any research study, it is therefore imperative to formulate a research question that is both clinically relevant and answerable.

Research hypothesis

The primary research question should be driven by the hypothesis rather than the data. 1 , 2 That is, the research question and hypothesis should be developed before the start of the study. This sounds intuitive; however, if we take, for example, a database of information, it is potentially possible to perform multiple statistical comparisons of groups within the database to find a statistically significant association. This could then lead one to work backward from the data and develop the “question.” This is counterintuitive to the process because the question is asked specifically to then find the answer, thus collecting data along the way (i.e., in a prospective manner). Multiple statistical testing of associations from data previously collected could potentially lead to spuriously positive findings of association through chance alone. 2 Therefore, a good hypothesis must be based on a good research question at the start of a trial and, indeed, drive data collection for the study.

The research or clinical hypothesis is developed from the research question and then the main elements of the study — sampling strategy, intervention (if applicable), comparison and outcome variables — are summarized in a form that establishes the basis for testing, statistical and ultimately clinical significance. 3 For example, in a research study comparing computer-assisted acetabular component insertion versus freehand acetabular component placement in patients in need of total hip arthroplasty, the experimental group would be computer-assisted insertion and the control/conventional group would be free-hand placement. The investigative team would first state a research hypothesis. This could be expressed as a single outcome (e.g., computer-assisted acetabular component placement leads to improved functional outcome) or potentially as a complex/composite outcome; that is, more than one outcome (e.g., computer-assisted acetabular component placement leads to both improved radiographic cup placement and improved functional outcome).

However, when formally testing statistical significance, the hypothesis should be stated as a “null” hypothesis. 2 The purpose of hypothesis testing is to make an inference about the population of interest on the basis of a random sample taken from that population. The null hypothesis for the preceding research hypothesis then would be that there is no difference in mean functional outcome between the computer-assisted insertion and free-hand placement techniques. After forming the null hypothesis, the researchers would form an alternate hypothesis stating the nature of the difference, if it should appear. The alternate hypothesis would be that there is a difference in mean functional outcome between these techniques. At the end of the study, the null hypothesis is then tested statistically. If the findings of the study are not statistically significant (i.e., there is no difference in functional outcome between the groups in a statistical sense), we cannot reject the null hypothesis, whereas if the findings were significant, we can reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternate hypothesis (i.e., there is a difference in mean functional outcome between the study groups), errors in testing notwithstanding. In other words, hypothesis testing confirms or refutes the statement that the observed findings did not occur by chance alone but rather occurred because there was a true difference in outcomes between these surgical procedures. The concept of statistical hypothesis testing is complex, and the details are beyond the scope of this article.

Another important concept inherent in hypothesis testing is whether the hypotheses will be 1-sided or 2-sided. A 2-sided hypothesis states that there is a difference between the experimental group and the control group, but it does not specify in advance the expected direction of the difference. For example, we asked whether there is there an improvement in outcomes with computer-assisted surgery or whether the outcomes worse with computer-assisted surgery. We presented a 2-sided test in the above example because we did not specify the direction of the difference. A 1-sided hypothesis states a specific direction (e.g., there is an improvement in outcomes with computer-assisted surgery). A 2-sided hypothesis should be used unless there is a good justification for using a 1-sided hypothesis. As Bland and Atlman 8 stated, “One-sided hypothesis testing should never be used as a device to make a conventionally nonsignificant difference significant.”

The research hypothesis should be stated at the beginning of the study to guide the objectives for research. Whereas the investigators may state the hypothesis as being 1-sided (there is an improvement with treatment), the study and investigators must adhere to the concept of clinical equipoise. According to this principle, a clinical (or surgical) trial is ethical only if the expert community is uncertain about the relative therapeutic merits of the experimental and control groups being evaluated. 9 It means there must exist an honest and professional disagreement among expert clinicians about the preferred treatment. 9

Designing a research hypothesis is supported by a good research question and will influence the type of research design for the study. Acting on the principles of appropriate hypothesis development, the study can then confidently proceed to the development of the research objective.

Research objective

The primary objective should be coupled with the hypothesis of the study. Study objectives define the specific aims of the study and should be clearly stated in the introduction of the research protocol. 7 From our previous example and using the investigative hypothesis that there is a difference in functional outcomes between computer-assisted acetabular component placement and free-hand placement, the primary objective can be stated as follows: this study will compare the functional outcomes of computer-assisted acetabular component insertion versus free-hand placement in patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty. Note that the study objective is an active statement about how the study is going to answer the specific research question. Objectives can (and often do) state exactly which outcome measures are going to be used within their statements. They are important because they not only help guide the development of the protocol and design of study but also play a role in sample size calculations and determining the power of the study. 7 These concepts will be discussed in other articles in this series.

From the surgeon’s point of view, it is important for the study objectives to be focused on outcomes that are important to patients and clinically relevant. For example, the most methodologically sound randomized controlled trial comparing 2 techniques of distal radial fixation would have little or no clinical impact if the primary objective was to determine the effect of treatment A as compared to treatment B on intraoperative fluoroscopy time. However, if the objective was to determine the effect of treatment A as compared to treatment B on patient functional outcome at 1 year, this would have a much more significant impact on clinical decision-making. Second, more meaningful surgeon–patient discussions could ensue, incorporating patient values and preferences with the results from this study. 6 , 7 It is the precise objective and what the investigator is trying to measure that is of clinical relevance in the practical setting.

The following is an example from the literature about the relation between the research question, hypothesis and study objectives:

Study: Warden SJ, Metcalf BR, Kiss ZS, et al. Low-intensity pulsed ultrasound for chronic patellar tendinopathy: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Rheumatology 2008;47:467–71.

Research question: How does low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) compare with a placebo device in managing the symptoms of skeletally mature patients with patellar tendinopathy?

Research hypothesis: Pain levels are reduced in patients who receive daily active-LIPUS (treatment) for 12 weeks compared with individuals who receive inactive-LIPUS (placebo).

Objective: To investigate the clinical efficacy of LIPUS in the management of patellar tendinopathy symptoms.

The development of the research question is the most important aspect of a research project. A research project can fail if the objectives and hypothesis are poorly focused and underdeveloped. Useful tips for surgical researchers are provided in Box 3 . Designing and developing an appropriate and relevant research question, hypothesis and objectives can be a difficult task. The critical appraisal of the research question used in a study is vital to the application of the findings to clinical practice. Focusing resources, time and dedication to these 3 very important tasks will help to guide a successful research project, influence interpretation of the results and affect future publication efforts.

Tips for developing research questions, hypotheses and objectives for research studies

• Perform a systematic literature review (if one has not been done) to increase knowledge and familiarity with the topic and to assist with research development.
• Learn about current trends and technological advances on the topic.
• Seek careful input from experts, mentors, colleagues and collaborators to refine your research question as this will aid in developing the research question and guide the research study.
• Use the FINER criteria in the development of the research question.
• Ensure that the research question follows PICOT format.
• Develop a research hypothesis from the research question.
• Develop clear and well-defined primary and secondary (if needed) objectives.
• Ensure that the research question and objectives are answerable, feasible and clinically relevant.

FINER = feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, relevant; PICOT = population (patients), intervention (for intervention studies only), comparison group, outcome of interest, time.

Competing interests: No funding was received in preparation of this paper. Dr. Bhandari was funded, in part, by a Canada Research Chair, McMaster University.

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5 questions for YouTube’s lead UX researcher

As marketers, it’s our job to ensure all the interactions people have with our brands and products are as positive, useful, and memorable as possible.

At Droga5, where I lead data strategy, we believe the best way of achieving this is to have a deep understanding of our clients’ target audience, and more specifically, of their needs.

Of course, these change by platform. When you need to find out why your subway is delayed, you might head to Twitter. When you need to know when your local bookstore closes, you might use Google Search. Why does any of this matter? Because we know that consumer needs are far more powerful than other indicators that marketers use, such as demographics.

That’s why when I was given the chance to talk with YouTube’s Josh Lewandowski, I jumped at it. As the lead user experience (UX) researcher on the platform’s main app, he has a deep understanding of why users head to YouTube, what they expect when they get there, and what that means for brands looking to grab their attention.

Amy Avery: What does your typical work day look like?

Josh Lewandowski: On any given day, I’m trying to answer one of two questions: What are the desires, needs, and problems our users have that we should be anticipating? And once we know what those are, what’s the best way to solve for them?

To answer those questions, I’m constantly doing both qualitative and quantitative research—everything from talking to users and watching them use YouTube in their homes, to carrying out lab studies to see if people use our products the way we expect them to.

What has this UX research revealed about why people come to YouTube?

Users always act to solve some kind of need. The three most common ones we’ve seen in our research are the need for help (when you want to fix something in your house, for example) the need for entertainment (people say they turn to YouTube for entertainment just as much as they turn to TV), and the need to learn something new. 1

Why people turn to YouTube

Think with google.

Source: 2and2/Google, “The Values of YouTube” Study, (n of 1,006 consumers between the ages of 18-54, with 918 monthly YouTube users). Respondents were asked to choose which platforms they turn to for a range of needs, Oct. 2017.

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These needs can show up in broad or specific ways. Someone might come to YouTube knowing exactly what they’re looking for—to listen to a particular version of a song, say. Others come to browse. They know roughly what they want—to get caught up on the latest news, for example—but they’re not looking for one video in particular.

On YouTube, we’re now seeing more browsing than searching behavior.

In fact, as our recommendation algorithms keep getting better, we’re now seeing more browsing than searching behavior. People are choosing to do less work and let us serve them.

What’s new in the world of user engagement and behavior on YouTube?

Something that makes YouTube unique compared to other traditional forms of media is the depth of interaction users and creators can have with one another.

One example of this is with mobile live streaming, which YouTube creators beta tested from Disneyland last year. During the stream, they were asking viewers what rides they should go on, and fans were chiming in with their recommendations.

We’re seeing this direct form of co-creation more and more now, especially with our new community tab . Creators will use this to routinely ask fans what type of content they want to see, what their favorite videos are, and where they should go next.

These examples might not seem especially relevant for marketers, but I think they speak to a broader change in user behavior: people are no longer satisfied with just passively consuming content, they also want rich interactions.

What YouTube UX change has had the biggest impact?

Adding interactive features such as polling, live chat, and video infocards , because it has helped make video viewing a more active, engaging experience.

We originally assumed all YouTube users wanted to “lean back” and do nothing other than watch something. But our research showed that wasn’t the case. Interactive features like polling make content a lot more dynamic for those who want it. If creators think their viewers want what we call a “lean forward” experience, they can now provide one.

Source: Google/Ipsos, “Video Mobile Diary,” U.S., 2017.

As you think about user experience in 2018, what’s one big thing you’re focused on?

Assessing the quality of YouTube at scale. It’s great to see that people are watching more, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the experience has improved.

Look at website clickbait, for example. It might get you to look at more content, but it’s not a great experience. My challenge is to answer the question, “how do we really know the experience is good across the board?”

Answering that question involves looking at a few things: Can users discover YouTube’s features and experiences? Do they know how to use those features? And do those features improve their experience?

We’re really starting to focus on user satisfaction as a measure of success for product development, ads, and even our algorithms. If what we're doing makes users happier, we're on the right track. And directly asking users “What’s your biggest frustration today?” and “What’s your favorite thing about YouTube?” provides more insights than we could gather from watch time alone.

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Inside google marketing: meeting video viewers where they are in 2018, youtube's ad ux leaders on how video ads have evolved, 4 new moments every marketer should know, how one retailer is shifting to an ai-first mentality, 5 questions to ask yourself about your mobile strategy, sources (1).

1  2and2/Google, “The Values of YouTube” Study, (n of 1,006 consumers between the ages of 18-54, with 918 monthly YouTube users). Respondents were asked to choose which platforms they turn to for a range of needs, Oct. 2017.

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Which social media platforms are most common, who uses each social media platform, find out more, social media fact sheet.

Many Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves. Explore the patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape.

To better understand Americans’ social media use, Pew Research Center surveyed 5,733 U.S. adults from May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023. Ipsos conducted this National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) for the Center using address-based sampling and a multimode protocol that included both web and mail. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race and ethnicity, education and other categories.

Polls from 2000 to 2021 were conducted via phone. For more on this mode shift, read our Q&A.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology ­­­.

A note on terminology: Our May-September 2023 survey was already in the field when Twitter changed its name to “X.” The terms  Twitter  and  X  are both used in this report to refer to the same platform.

YouTube and Facebook are the most-widely used online platforms. About half of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, and smaller shares use sites or apps such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter (X) and BeReal.

Note: The vertical line indicates a change in mode. Polls from 2012-2021 were conducted via phone. In 2023, the poll was conducted via web and mail. For more details on this shift, please read our Q&A . Refer to the topline for more information on how question wording varied over the years. Pre-2018 data is not available for YouTube, Snapchat or WhatsApp; pre-2019 data is not available for Reddit; pre-2021 data is not available for TikTok; pre-2023 data is not available for BeReal. Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown.

Source: Surveys of U.S. adults conducted 2012-2023.

Usage of the major online platforms varies by factors such as age, gender and level of formal education.

% of U.S. adults who say they ever use __ by …

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Follow these links for more in-depth analysis of the impact of social media on American life.

• Americans’ Social Media Use  Jan. 31, 2024
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• Q&A: How and why we’re changing the way we study tech adoption  Jan. 31, 2024

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Emerald Ash Borer detected in Lyon County

Kansas forest service urges tree diversity to mitigate impacts of the wood-boring beetle.

At a glance: The Kansas Department of Agriculture has confirmed the presence of the Emerald Ash Borer in Emporia, making Lyon County the 14th county in Kansas confirmed to have the invasive insect.

More information: Matt Norville, 785-473-1064, [email protected]

Photos: Emerald Ash Borer damage | Emerald Ash Borer in Kansas (Map)

Related: Recommended Trees (Kansas) | Emerald Ash Borer spread in Kansas (map)

May 31, 2024

K-State Research and Extension news service

MANHATTAN, Kan. – The Kansas Department of Agriculture has confirmed the presence of the Emerald Ash Borer in Emporia last week, making Lyon County the 14th county in Kansas confirmed to have the invasive insect.

At right: Emerald Ash Borer damage on tree limb | Download this photo

On May 24th, the Kansas Department of Agriculture officially detected EAB in Emporia, although it was suspected in Lyon County for much longer.

Matt Norville, the community forestry coordinator for the Kansas Forest Service, shared the reason for the delay between suspecting EAB and officially detecting the species.

“In order to officially confirm EAB, the Kansas Department of Agriculture requires an adult or larvae specimen,” he said. “It can be challenging for foresters or arborists working in these communities who may see declining ash and the galleries the insects leave behind, but detecting the actual insect is essential to making the call that it is officially in the county.”

The resulting larvae bore into the ash tree and feed under the bark, leaving visible tracks underneath. Small trees can die as soon as 1-2 years after infestation, while larger infested trees may survive 3-4 years.

“Trees can tolerate borer activity for a few years, but without treatment they will eventually decline,” Norville said.

But Norville says early detection and proper treatment can save infected trees. He recommends treatment as soon as possible by a licensed pesticide applicator. Treatment can be done by landowners on smaller trees, but smaller trees are better candidates for removal and replacement as treatment would need to continue indefinitely.

“We mostly want to encourage communities to plan for pests and diseases and increase their community tree diversity,” Norville said. “We’ve seen how diseases like Dutch elm disease and pests like emerald ash borer can have a devastating impact on communities that have an abundance of one type of tree. Communities that plan for tree removal due to age and overall health should be planting replacement trees that are a mix of native and proven cultivars.”

For lists of recommended trees for your part of the state, Norville encouraged Kansans to visit https://www.kansasforests.org/resources/recommendedtreesandshrubs.html .

To learn more about where EAB has spread and treatment options for homeowners visit: https://www.kansasforests.org/forest_health/current_pests/emeraldashborer.html .

• Updated: 5/31/24

• International

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Fauci testifies on the origins of Covid-19

By Antoinette Radford, Maureen Chowdhury, Elise Hammond, Carma Hassan and Jen Christensen

Key takeaways from Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony at House hearing on Covid-19 pandemic

From CNN's Jen Christensen, Elise Hammond, Antoinette Radford and Maureen Chowdhury

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), testified Monday at a House subcommittee hearing about the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the origins of the virus.

The hearing was Fauci’s first public testimony on Capitol Hill since his retirement from government service. It turned contentious at times as Republicans grilled Fauci over a wide range of topics, including the basis for public health recommendations during the pandemic and email use by public health officials.

Here are key takeaways from the hearing:

• US still needs to be better prepared for next pandemic: Fauci said there are still some things the US needs to work on to be ready for another pandemic, saying in “some respects” the country is better prepared to deal with a health crisis than in 2020, “but in others, I am still disappointed.” One thing that he hopes the US will do better moving forward is tightening communication between the federal response and local public health officials.
• Republicans grill Fauci over public health official’s use of email: Fauci testified Monday that he has not used his personal email to conduct business, and he was not aware before a congressional investigation that a former senior adviser at the National Institutes of Health had used an unofficial email. The House Oversight select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic previously released a series of  private   emails  that Republicans argue show that some NIH officials deleted emails and tried to get around requirements to disclose information through public records laws.
• Fauci testifies about possible origins of virus that caused Covid-19: Fauci testified that in early 2020, he was informed through phone calls with two scientists that they and others were concerned that the virus that causes Covid-19 could have been manipulated in the lab. The day after those calls, Fauci said several international virologists examined it further and found that “several who at first were concerned about lab manipulation became convinced that the virus was not deliberately manipulated.” Scientists found the most likely scenario, Fauci said, was a virus that transferred from an animal to a human, “although they still kept an open mind.”
• Fauci details threats he and his family have received: Fauci detailed the threats he received during his time as the director of the NIAID, describing threats against him and his family. “Everything from harassments from emails, texts, letters of myself, my wife, my three daughters. There have been credible death threats leading to the arrest of two individuals – and credible death threats means someone who clearly was on their way to kill me. And it’s required my having protective services essentially all the time.”
• 6-foot social distance guideline: Fauci clarified that the 6-foot guidance for social distancing given during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic did not come from him, but from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fauci, who repeated the guidance during the pandemic, once said that there was no science behind it — but he meant that there were no clinical trials to back it up. He added that he believed the CDC used studies about droplets years ago as reasoning for the 6-foot guidelines.

Fauci says he supports suspending funding to EcoHealth Alliance

CNN's Jen Christensen

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Monday he supports suspending US grant funding to EcoHealth Alliance , a New York-based virus research organization that has been tied to question and controversy around the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19.

The US Department of Health and Human Services in May suspended funding to EcoHealth Alliance and proposed the group be blocked from receiving federal funds in the future, possibly for years.

Asked on Monday if he supposed the suspension and debarment of EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci responded “yes.” 

Before the pandemic, the US gave a $120,000 grant to EcoHealth Alliance with a subaward that funded work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In April 2020, the National Institutes of Health terminated the grant.

Fauci said that he later learned that the White House had called to tell the NIH to cancel the grant. Asked Monday if he agreed or disagreed with the decision at the time, he said that wasn’t his problem with the request.

“It wasn’t a question of agreeing or disagreeing. It was like, ‘Can we really do that? I don’t think that you can do that.’ And as it turned out I was right, because the general counsel of HHS said, 'By the way, you can’t do that. You’ve got to restore the grant,' ” Fauci testified.

The grant was reinstated, then suspended pending a compliance review.

Fauci said once he learned that there were compliance issues with the grant, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was told to stay out of it.

Since that time, NIH found numerous violations of grant policies by EcoHealth and has since blocked funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and suspended and proposed blocking NIH funding to EcoHealth as an institution and Dr. Peter Daszak individually.

In a May letter to EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Dr. Peter Daszak, HHS lists 30 pieces of evidence some dating back to 2013 to support its decision. HHS said in a memo that EcoHealth failed to “adequately monitor” virus growth experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, notify the NIH that viruses studied there “appeared to grow beyond permissible thresholds” laid out in a grant or provide requested information in a timely manner.

In a statement last month, a spokeperson for EcoHealth Alliance said the organization was “disappointed by HHS’ decision" and that it would contest the decision.

GOP subcommittee chair and ranking member wrap up hearing with closing statements

From CNN's Maureen Chowdhury

In his closing statement, Ranking Member Raul Ruiz thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for his testimony and for his decades of service to the nation in dealing with various epidemics and pandemics.

He also blasted Republicans for pushing extreme narratives for political gain.

"Over the past four years you have been personally targeted by extreme narratives of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the US governments response to it," Ruiz said. "These extreme narratives have been the bedrock of this subcommittees Republican-led probe and have been undermined by what's been found through interviews and by thousands of documents that have been reviewed."

Ruiz added that the evidence found that "Dr. Fauci did not fund research through the EcoHealth Alliance Grant that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci did not lie about gain of function research in Wuhan China, Dr. Fauci did not orchestrate a campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory."

Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup also thanked Fauci for coming voluntarily to testify.

He went on to say that the hearing was an opportunity to learn more about the government's Covid-19 response and how the government can improve and do better. He said that while there some things that were done well, there were some wrongdoings in the office where Fauci served.

Wenstrup highlighted that moving forward, clarity is important in order to improve messaging.

"I think what I'm most concerned about as we go forward as a country and from our agencies is that we an be trusted and that we are better in our messaging and talk about clarity," Wenstrup said.

Officials will evaluate "cost-benefit ratio" of vaccine mandates in analysis of pandemic response, Fauci says

From CNN's Elise Hammond

When evaluating the United States’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, public health officials will take a closer look at “the cost-benefit ratio” of things like vaccine mandates, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

Fauci was answering a question about whether issuing mandates could have led to vaccine hesitancy.

“That’s something that I think we need to go back now, when we do an after-the-event evaluation about whether or not given the psyche of the country and the pushback that you get from those types of things — we need to reevaluate the cost-benefit ratio of those types of things,” Fauci said.

Earlier in the hearing, Fauci defended the government’s use of vaccines as saving “hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and millions of lives throughout the world.

US still needs to close communication gaps to be better prepared for next pandemic, Fauci says

Dr. Anthony Fauci said there are still some things the United States needs to work on to be more prepared for another pandemic in the aftermath of Covid-19.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said in “some respects” the country is better prepared to deal with a health crisis than in 2020, “but in others, I am still disappointed.”

Fauci was answering a question from Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who served as the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management during the pandemic. The lawmaker said he felt that states were not ready to deal with Covid-19.

“I think one of the things that was really a problem with the response was the degree of divisiveness that we had in the country about a lack of a coherent response where we were having people, for reasons that had nothing to do with public health or science, refusing to adhere to public health intervention measures,” Fauci said.

One thing that he hopes the US will do better moving forward is tightening communication between the federal response and local public health officials.

He said there was a “disconnect between the healthcare system and the public health system” during Covid-19 in the US. Specifically, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) could not demand information from local agencies, which caused a lag in sharing data.

“We were at a disadvantage,” Fauci said, adding that the CDC is working on ways to fix this pain point.

California lawmaker whose parents died of Covid-19 thanks Fauci for life-saving policies

California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, who said both of his parents died from Covid-19, thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for putting in policies that saved lives during the pandemic.

Garcia said his mother was a health care worker and she and his step-father both died from Covid-19.

“I lost both of my parents during the pandemic, so I take this very personally," he said, condemning other lawmakers “who are tasked to be responsible and actually help the American people” attack medical professionals, Garcia said.

The comments came after heated remarks from Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who criticized mask mandates and called for Fauci to be put in prison.

“Your quote-unquote so-called science that the gentlewoman is referring to has saved millions of lives in this country and around the world,” Garcia said. “It’s important to note that my opinion is that you are an American hero and your team has done more to save lives than all 435 members of this body on both sides of the aisle.”

GOP chairman has to remind Marjorie Taylor Greene to be respectful as she refuses to call Fauci a doctor

CNN's Haley Talbot

GOP Chairman Brad Wenstrup had to remind Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be respectful after she insisted that she would not refer to Dr. Anthony Fauci by the title of doctor and would only refer to him as "Mr. Fauci."

"You're not doctor, you're Mr. Fauci in my few minutes," Greene said.

In response, Wenstrup ordered Greene to address Fauci as a doctor. “I have instructed her to address him as doctor,” Wenstrup said. 

“I’m not addressing him as doctor,” she shot back.  

Several Democratic lawmakers jumped in to criticize Greene over her refusal to address Fauci as a doctor.

Wenstrup then asked members to “afford all other members the respect they are entitled” and to “refrain from using rhetoric that could be construed as an attack on the motives or character of another member or the witness.”

Fauci: NIH official using unofficial email is an "aberrancy and an outlier"

Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Monday that he has not used his personal email to conduct business, and he was not aware before a congressional investigation that a former senior adviser at the National Institutes of Health had used unofficial email.

“What you saw, I believe, with Dr. Morens was aberrancy and an outlier,” Fauci testified on Monday, referring to a former senior adviser at NIH. “The individuals at the NIH and NIAID are a very committed group of individuals and this one instance that you point out is an aberrancy and an outlier.”

The House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic previously released a series of  private emails  that Republican members of the committee argue show that some NIH officials deleted emails and tried to get around requirements to disclose information through public records laws.

In a memo  published at the end of May , committee members said Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci, engaged in “nefarious behavior.” The committee points to email that Morens sent another colleague that suggests he would send email to Fauci’s private account and “there is no worry about FOIAs.” FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives the public the right to obtain federal records, including emails sent within government agencies. Morens’ email goes on to say that he can also hand information to Fauci to avoid it being a part of the public record.

“He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens said in a 2021 email to Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit virus research organization linked to controversy about the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19. The US Department of Health and Human Services suspended funding to the group in May.

Fauci details threats he and his family have received

From CNN's Antoinette Radford

Anthony Fauci detailed the threats he received during his time as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describing death threats against him and threats against his wife and daughters.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell asked Fauci to explain what some of the threats were, where he replied:

“Everything from harassments from emails, texts, letters of myself, my wife, my three daughters. There have been credible death threats leading to the arrest of two individuals – and credible death threats means someone who clearly was on their way to kill me. And it’s required my having protective services essentially all the time," Fauci said.

Fauci said he feared that the threats against public health workers during the Covid-19 pandemic would serve as a “powerful disincentive” for the best and brightest candidates to take up the profession.

“They say to themselves, 'I don’t want to go there. Why should I get involved in that?'” he said.

“They’re reluctant to put themselves and their family through what they see their colleagues being put through,” he testified.

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Al-Adra Awarded Pilot Research Grant from Liver Disease Research Foundation

Before a donor liver is transplanted into an organ recipient, could it be modified to reduce the risk of the recipient’s immune system rejecting the liver? That’s the question Division of Transplantation Assistant Professor David Al-Adra, MD, PhD will begin to explore with a new one-year, $50,000 Pilot Research Award from the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases Foundation. Al-Adra and his research team are focused on small particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs) that are released by the liver.

According to Al-Adra, “We know that EVs play an important role in determining how the recipient’s immune system responds to a transplanted organ – but we don’t know why certain EVs may help the immune system adjust to the new organ while other EVs may support the immune system’s rejection of a donor organ.”

Al-Adra will be using a liver storage technique called normothermic ex vivo liver perfusion (NEVLP) to study EVs. Rather than placing a donor liver on ice before it is transplanted into the organ recipient, NEVLP allows the transplant team to keep the liver warm by continuously pumping blood through it. This in turn allows the liver to resume its normal physiologic activity while it awaits transplantation.

“NEVLP provides us with a great opportunity to study EVs that are produced directly by the liver,” explained Al-Adra.

The research team plans to pilot test the use of NEVLP to study liver-produced EVs using a rat model of liver transplantation. They will also be testing whether they can modify the environment in which the liver is stored during NEVLP to make the EVs more likely to support regulation of the immune system.

“This study is going to give us a much better understanding of the immune-related function of liver-derived EVs in a transplant setting. We can then use these results to obtain additional research funding so we can gene edit EVs during NEVLP in a way that will help them support regulation of the organ recipient’s immune system, thereby decreasing rejection of the transplanted liver,” said Al-Adra.

Here’s how you know

• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• National Institutes of Health

NCCIH Research Blog

It’s official changes in fellowship processes are taking effect.

June 3, 2024

Jessica McKlveen , Ph.D.

Office of Scientific Review

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health

View biographical sketch

Today, I am pleased to let you know about the now-official changes to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) fellowship application and review process, which will take effect for fellowship applications having receipt dates of January 25, 2025, and beyond.  

In the past, the NIH extramural community had voiced concerns that the fellowship peer review process may disadvantage some highly qualified candidates. I previously  blogged about this and a related NIH Request for Information, NOT-OD-23-110, that invited public comment. After careful consideration of all feedback received, NIH set out to restructure the review of fellowship applications and announced on April 18 the exact changes to be made (see  Implementation of Revisions to the NIH and AHRQ Fellowship Application and Review Process, NOT-OD-24-107 ). 

The overall goal of revising the process is to ensure that the most promising fellowship candidates will be consistently identified by scientific review panels. The changes are designed to:

• The fellowship candidate’s goals, preparedness, and potential
• The research training plan
• The commitment to the candidate   
• Ensure that a broad range of candidates and research training contexts can be recognized as meritorious by clarifying and simplifying the language in the application instructions and review criteria  
• Reduce bias in review by emphasizing the commitment to the candidate without undue consideration of sponsor and institutional reputation  

We at NIH are working to prepare applicants and reviewers for the upcoming changes through various webinars, presentations, and other resources. If you’re a potential NIH fellowship applicant or you work with these applicants or fellows, I invite you to  register now for an upcoming NIH webinar on Thursday, September 19, 2024 , from 2 to 3 p.m. ET, to learn more and have your questions answered by experts. Please pass this opportunity along to colleagues who may be interested. If you can’t attend, the webinar’s presentations and resources will be posted on NIH Grants and Funding’s  Training and Resources webpage soon after the event. 

NIH will also share more information as January 25, 2025, draws closer. Details and guidance will be available on the  Revisions to the NIH Fellowship Application and Review Process webpage. If you have any questions, you can email  [email protected] .

All of us in the Division of Extramural Activities, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, recognize that these revisions will greatly change how fellowship applications are prepared and reviewed. We hope you’ll find that they simplify and clarify the application process. 

For More Information: 

• NIH webinar on September 19, 2024: “ Revisions to the Fellowship Application and Review Process ” 
• NIH homepage on the changes, including background, candidate guidance, FAQs, etc.:  Revisions to the NIH Fellowship Application and Review Process
• NIH Individual Fellowships (F) Kiosk
• Announcing Revisions to the NIH Fellowship Review and Application Process , blog post by Michael Lauer, M.D., and Noni Byrnes, Ph.D., NIH

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