Am I Missing Something?

Am I the only one who notices the ambiguous and largely useless or common sense results of research studies these days?

Think about it for a moment. The government, corperations and organizations dish out a few oodles of cash to some research group. They conduct a study on topic X. After a few months, a year or maybe a few years we get the results. The results somehow always end up as follows.

"The frequent use of video games may cause an increase in violent behavior."

At first glance, as it always seems, we get some useful information here. However, a close analysis reveals the following:

•The specification of how frequent is missing
•Exactly what kind of use, or duration thereof, is also missing
•Note the use of the word "may"
•How much of an increase is also absent
•Violent behaviour is not defined, meaning it could very well mean more video game playing

While the material I'm critiquing here is made by my own hand, I'm sure you can see the similarities between it and what information we get from the researchers. I could say a similar concerning water.

"Repeated overconsumption of water can lead to discomfort, frequent waste discharge, and/or death."

In plain english, minus all those millions of dollars and long night spent analyzing data, all that says is, "If you drink too much water too often, you'll feel bloated, probably have to pee a lot, and might drown."

I might be missing something, but do these researchers have some method by which you can be privy to the data they base their claims off of? I'm far more interested in looking into what kind of people are are risk or would benefit from eating or drinking whatever reduces or causes cancer than hearing these common blanket statements. However, the internet hasn't helped me find out any of that.

Studies seem to find some strange fact, and leave it at that. For all that time, money and research we don't get anything that seems at all useful. If someone is going to study how video games effect people, it would really be nice to know what kind of background had what trends. Did playing these video games affect this demographics different from that one? How does age factor into it? Questions like these would help me disprove or affirm my common sense which states, "Don't give violent video games or other media to disturbed or impressionable people."

Sadly, I don't ever seem to be able to find any decent followups to studies to help me with this. As the title of this post indicates, I might really just be missing something. I'm afraid that if I'm missing it, there are also a ton of others like me doing likewise. Such a state will only reinforce the ignorance we face these days, and should be stopped.

So please, if there's some way to get my hands on some of the hard data, I'd love to know what it is.