Psychology students in the newsroom

APA helps fund media fellowships for two budding science journalists.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

As a psychology graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Kirk Kicklighter was disappointed with the often vague and impenetrable language of journal articles. And he?s come to admire the communication skills of good science journalists and the power they have to focus public attention and energy on particular issues.

So this summer he tried his hand at writing for the public as one of 20 scientists selected as Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He and Yale University graduate student Siri Jane Carpenter were the two psychology students among the group, supported in part by funds donated by APA?s Science Directorate. (The funds guaranteed that at least one AAAS media fellow would be a psychologist.)

Carpenter spent the summer at the Richmond Times Dispatch in Virginia, and Kicklighter worked for the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina.

Each summer the program places students from myriad sciences into 10-week media assignments as researchers, reporters and production assistants at newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations. For 23 years AAAS has used the program to strengthen the connection between scientists and journalists and improve and increase media coverage of complex scientific issues, says program coordinator Amie King.

To date AAAS has placed 366 fellows. About half go into journalism either full time or as a sideline to their work as researchers. The rest return to the lab with a better understanding of the time and space constraints journalists face and a respect for what the media does, says King. Strengthening the connection between psychological researchers and the media has been a major goal of APA?s Science Directorate over the past two years.

Last year the directorate sent three established science journalists on educational outings to psychology labs around the country. The AAAS program may be an even more efficient way to achieve the directorate?s goal, says Christine Hartel, PhD, APA?s associate executive director of science.

'Capitalizing on the enthusiasm of people just starting out in psychology is probably one of the wisest investments we can make in our mission of helping the public understand psychology as a science,' says Hartel.

AAAS provides the fellows with a two-day orientation at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. This year they had workshops on writing story leads and conducting interviews. They visited newsrooms around Washington, including Time magazine, National Public Radio and the local CBS television affiliate.

Grounded in science

Carpenter hopes to pursue science journalism full time after she finishes her PhD in social psychology in 2000.

'I want to finish my degree because I feel like I?m learning a lot from my program,' says Carpenter, who is highly praised as a top student by her adviser Mahzarin Banaji, PhD. But after graduating, she will leave research behind for writing.

Her background in research should help her become a thorough and professional science writer, she says. She adds that her psychology training provides a healthy dose of skepticism, solid grounding in statistics, a sense of the methods researchers use and an understanding of the difference between causality and correlation.

Just weeks into the summer, Carpenter was well established at the Dispatch. She worked with a team of science writers, including reporters covering general science, health, the environment and technology. And she wrote about

a story a week. Her experience should serve her well as she heads back to Yale to write her dissertation and to pursue writing in her spare time, she says.

Communicating to the public

Kicklighter is using the AAAS fellowship as a springboard to larger endeavors that will likely include writing at their core.

He finished his master?s degree in developmental psychology at the University of Minnesota in May, and is now exploring ways to study human development that combine psychology, journalism, history and religion.

Some of his role models in this respect are child psychiatrist Robert Coles, MD, and psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, and Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, with whom Kicklighter worked for a year at the University of Pennsylvania.

His desire to better understand human development and communicate what he learns with the public began with his studies of public policy at Duke University and Harvard?s Kennedy School of Public Policy.

Kicklighter felt at home in North Carolina working for the Observer. By mid-June he already had a cover story on nonpesti-cide methods for killing weeds and pests that was picked up by several papers around the country.

To find out more about the AAAS mass media fellowship program, contact Amie King at: (202) 326-6760.