Lost in transcription

It’s often hard to tell who is responsible for a bad statistics story: did the journalist mess up it, or was it already broken? The  Herald’s story “Shoe therapy has real benefits – study” is an exception. It’s the paper’s fault.

If you go to the University of Canterbury home page, there’s a link to their press release about Jessica Boyce’s research.  Ms Boyce has found

• Women who feel more insecure after exposure to media body ideals own more attractiveness-conferring accessories such as shoes and handbags, but not trousers
• Women who are, in general, insecure, own fewer accessories

where ‘women’ means female students at UoC or University of Alberta.   She interprets the first finding to mean that buying accessories is a response to the media images, since the second finding means it isn’t simple reverse causation.  The Herald reports the first of these points, but not the second, which unfortunately makes the interpretation look completely silly, rather than perfectly plausible, though not compelling.

I’m a bit confused as to why UoC is promoting the story  now.  There isn’t any mention made of a publication or conference presentation, and she  still ‘hopes to finish her thesis by the end of the year’, so that’s not the trigger.