Repetitive Strain Injury
Assignment:
Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) has been called the disease of the
90s. You have been pitching a story without success for months as
cases of RSI among computer programmers, journalists, people who
run cash registers,
and even college students pile up at alarming rates. Until now,
your editor's
been reluctant to make the assignment, in part because she's
heard that RSI
may be a psychological condition rather than a physical one, and
that it can be
prevented. But that reluctance turned into a quick assignment
when the paper's
star investigative reporter was diagnosed with a serious case of
RSI during
the home stretch of writing a series that has been in the works
for nearly
a year.
Your assignment is to write an article about RSI focussing
on its potential effects on people and businesses in your
community. Your editor would like you to get
expert opinions about whether this is a psychological problem
or a physical problem. She also wants statistics about the
number of people afflicted and the seriousness of their
disabilities, interviews with several people who suffer from RSI
and a sidebar about
how RSI can be prevented. You'll also need to provide information
for an
infographic.
Approach:
You can use the Internet to find information and people to
interview
for this story.
Start by using a search engine such as
Lycos. Searching for the term "RSI" with Lycos will produce
some 1,065 hits.
Of course some of the hits, such as
the RSI '95 Home Pageof the Center for Excellence in
Education, are not relevant. (You can eliminate
some of these irrelevant hits by searching for "RSI" and "injury"
or by searching for the
phrase "repetitive strain injury.") But the
Computer Related Repetitive Strain Injury page proves quite
useful. This page includes
pointers to a
Typing Injury FAQ (frequently asked questions) list which
gives information
on preventing RSI and lists publications, mailing lists, and
other RSI
references. It also mentions an RSI support group that meets
every Wednesday
for a real-time chat in the Equal Access Cafe area of America
Online and includes links to more than a dozen mailing lists
and newsgroups that focus on some aspect of RSI. Another
link -- this time to an article called "Ground Breaking Study
Research Debunks RSI Myth" that
appeared in the January 1993 newsletter of
Worksafe Australia -- leads to a researcher
who has studied RSI and has found evidence that it is a physical
rather than psychological condition.
Finally, the Computer Related Repetitive Strain Injury
Page leads to the OSHA
Home
Page with links to detailed news releases with statistics
about Occupational Injuries and Illnesses and Work Injuries and
Illnesses by Selected Characteristics
and the
U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics database.
Don't stop with Lycos. A quick visit
to some other search engines may yield different and/or more
valuable sites.
Searching
WebCrawler with the term "RSI" produces about 286 hits,
including
the Safe Computing page from a company that sells ergonomic furniture
and
computer equipment over the Internet.
You can also try using a categorized index such as Yahoo. Start by looking under health.
From there enter the words "computer related hazard" and search
only in health.
You will find a half-dozen online documents indexed here,
including most of the best documents we found with the search
engines. You might also look through Yahoo's government and law
pages for
statistics and information about related legal issues.
Don't forget to consider the accuracy of your sources when you
find information on the Internet. Most of the RSI pages we found
were provided by
individuals who are not medical experts. Fortunately, many of
them cite the original sources of their information. Some pages
even carry disclaimers. It is usually a
good idea to go back to the original information source to verify
information
you find on the Internet.
Last update 10 May 1996
http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/spj/surf/rsi.html
Prepared by Lorrie Faith Cranor (lorracks@cs.wustl.edu) and
Staci D. Kramer (sdk@cris.com)