Are Playground Accidents Really More Dangerous Than Automobile Accidents?
The New York Times recently lead off a story about accidents on playgrounds by claiming,
Children are more likely to be seriously injured on playground equipment than they are in bicycle or car crashes, researchers are reporting today.
This is such an extreme distortion of what the researchers actually said, that the Times should fire the person who wrote this as well as the editor who let it slip through. While perhaps a minor story among other events the Times covers, the distortion here is representative of journalist’s tendency to sensationalize stories that they often don’t understand.
The claim is based on a study conducted by researchers at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, and published in the July issue Ambulatory Pediatrics.
The study looked at children who wound up in the emergency room after falling from playground equipment in the years 1992 to 1997. As The Times correctly reports, researchers found that a higher percentage of children brought to the emergency room after playground accidents had serious injuries than children brought to the emergency room after car and bicycle accidents. It also found that emergency visits for playground accidents declined from 187,000 per year in 1992 to only 98,000 in 1997.
Is it reasonable to conclude from this that the risk of serious injury from playground accidents is higher than for automobile accidents? Actually, no.
As pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene notes on his web site, the apparent high risk is due to selection bias,
The confusion comes because among those children that go to the emergency room, a higher proportion of playground injuries are moderate to severe. this means that parents are more comfortable handling minor playground injuries at home, not that playgrounds are more dangerous!
What the study really shows is that children with minor injuries are more likely to end up visiting an emergency room if they receive those injuries as the result of a car accident rather than as the result of a playground fall. This shouldn’t be surprising, since most parents are probably more secure in being able to treat minor injuries from falls off playground equipment, whereas car accidents can potentially involve the sort of severe injuries where it often pays to seek emergency treatment even for apparently minor injuries.
Shame on The Times for trying to scare parents and children away from playground equipment.
Sources:
Correcting the New York Times. Dr. Alan Greene, July 27, 2001.
Safety: Children face perils of the playground. The New York Times, July 24, 2001.
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