The post-modernist right is fond of claims that peer-refereeing is stacked against anti-evolutionist perspectives, that academia is a hotbed of leftism, and that any social-scientific survey whose results they disagree with (usually because it shows public opinion to be out of kilter with right wing orthodoxy) is “advocacy research”. Yet the accepted canons of academic research actually allow other researchers to scrutinise the data used and the methodology. Except when it’s research that the right funds.
Recent reporting on a survey on attitudes to termination of pregnancy undertaken by the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute expressed surprise over the findings, which run counter to almost all opinion research undertaken on the issue in the last decade:
Almost two-thirds of Australians support the idea of abortion being legally available but a similar number have serious qualms about the level of abortions taking place in Australia, according to a survey released today.
The research was undertaken by the Adelaide-based Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, an independent academic organisation funded by an aged-care company, and claims to be the most comprehensive survey on attitudes to abortion conducted to date.
The survey reveals that Australians’ views on abortion are more complex than the simple pro-life versus pro-choice debate, and that many see it as “a necessary evil”.
When asked whether they supported abortion on demand, 62 per cent of respondents said “yes”.
But a similar number - 64 per cent - think the abortion rate is too high. There are about 90,000 abortions a year, according to the report, which surveyed 1200 people by telephone.
About 87 per cent of people want to reduce the number of abortions while, at the same time, protecting existing legal rights to choose abortion freely.
No doubt this research will be seized on by the usual suspects - Janet Albrechtsen, Ron Boswell, Tony Abbott and John Anderson.
However, the Institute may not be an “independent academic organisation funded by an aged-care company”. Eva Cox, writing in Online Catholics [article available only to subscribers] has discovered two very telling things. First, the Institute refuse to allow independent researchers access to the data or to release the survey questions. Secondly, the Institute is not in fact an independent Institute:
Ms Cox’s concerns arose originally because of secrecy about the questions asked and other aspects of the methodology. Ms Cox contacted the Institute for access to the research questions, but was refused access by the PR person, who claimed - confirmed later by by the Institute’s acting Director, Dr Greg Pike - that it would undermine ongoing research into the area if the questions entered the public domain.
“It is important in assessing the validity of research data to look at the questions that were asked and their format - whether answers were provided closed questions or open to respondents’ own words,” Ms Cox said. “It is not reasonable to deny access to a research instrument for this reason.”
Ms Cox said she became curious to know who funded the research as this may affect also the questions - and the outcome - of the research, which claims to have found that 73% of Australians believe that the abortion rate should be reduced and 71% want a continuing and inclusive public debate about giving women real alternatives to abortion.
“I was told the project was stage one of a four stage project. This means big money, perhaps in the region of $30,000 for fieldwork alone,” Ms Cox said. “I did not ask the question about funding, but I do now.”
The Southern Cross Bioethics Institute was initiated by Southern Cross Care (SA) Inc in 1987. While everyone spoken to by Online Catholics yesterday asserted that the Institute was an independent organisation, legally this seems doubtful; indeed the contributor list is a who’s who of conservative Catholic thinkers.
Further, Southern Cross Care is itself a product of the Knights of the Southern Cross who describe themselves as “an Order of Catholic men committed to promoting the Christian way of life throughout Australia”.
Southern Cross Care Chairman, Brendan Bowler, told Online Catholics yesterday that the constitution of Southern Cross Care specifies that the Board of Southern Cross Care must contain a majority of Knights. “There are nine members of the Board, and five are Knights,” Mr Bowler said, adding that of the others, two were women and ineligible and two were not Knights. In addition, any Knight of the Southern Cross is qualified to become a member of the Southern Cross Care (SA) Inc which is an association. It has 30 members - all are Knights.
Yesterday, the front page of the Knights’ website calls for urgent action against abortion.
Eva Cox said the fact that many involved in the research were known conservative Catholics (the principal researcher were Rev Dr John Fleming, newly appointed President of Campion College in Sydney and Selena Ewing of the Women’s Forum Australia) was not altogether a problem. But he who pays the piper might call the tune. “This report could contribute to designing a political or public campaign to support particular viewpoints”.
“This is not in itself unethical. But failure to reveal its questions and funding does raise raises issues of professional and academic ethics,” Ms Cox said.
Advocacy research!
It’s nice, and telling that Eva Cox can hammer the point home about ‘advocacy research’ and the total double standard when it comes to conservative think tanks.
Unfortunately I don’t think it’ll make the slightest bit of difference. Researchers like the ones working for the SCBI don’t see a conflict between their advocacy and the relative ‘independence’ of their research. Truth, for them, is truth, is truth, and ‘independence’ has nothing to do with it.
We in the left-wing trenches in the culture wars are fighting a pointless battle in this case. How can we hold these kinds of ‘advocacy researchers’ to standards that they implicitly reject?
-”Knights of the Southern Cross”-
I feel like i’m in some pop-lit twilight zone forever haunted by the Da Vinci code.
They’re quite an old group, in Australia and the US and other countries they were meant to be a kind of mens-only group to offset the Freemasons, who had a strict no-Micks policy.
The point, though, Liam, is that the media ought to subject this supposedly objective research to scrutiny rather than reporting it as if it followed the canons of social science research.
Mark, you may not have noticed but ‘the media’ is hardly an ‘independent’ organisation, and the same rules apply under culture war circumstances.
Do you read the Courier Mail as if it were New Scientist?
No - but you’d have thought that any competent journo might have wondered what this organisation that sprung up out of nowhere was. There aren’t too many “independent academic institutes” - the first thing that would occur, you would think, is who’s paying for this disinterested research.
The funding of research is irrelevant to the quality of the research.
you can only determine the quality by examining the data.
In this case if one is unable and despite agreeing with their attitudes I cannot accept the findings until the data is examined.
how ironic that Eva cox of all people should enquire about survet methodoloy!
Great stuff by Cox, yep the media is hopelessly compromised with it’s navel gazing, ownership concentrations, echo chambers and love of political trivia, this is real journalism. Goes to show that journalism can be done by anyone. Liam is right on this battle being a one sided one. The solution? We’re going to have to do it for ourselves with collective support of each others work.
Eva Cox contributing to a journal calling itself Online Catholics?
But beyond how strange that seems… (yes, I know about “Online Catholics”, where it comes from and who supports it, and that there is no surprise in Eva Cox turning up in it). Just couldn’t resist.
I know there’s no science about it, but this survey result pretty much tallies with what I’d think is the feeling out there. It’s not my opinion (I’m vehermently pro life under any circumstances), but this formulation (abortion on demand OK, but too many happening) has certainly been put to me by plenty of friends/colleagues/aquaintances as their position. And whatever you think about John Howard, he’s got sensitive antennae for the public mood, and that’s how he’s expressed it.
So let’s pretend for the time being it might be a relative accurate reflection of what many people think - do we really think Eva has a problem with these numbers because she’s concerned about academic independence? Or because it runs counter to what she wants us all to think? You get the feeling sometimes that Eva would only be happy with mandatory abortion….
And I’m not sure even how competant a journo you have to be - as soon as I saw “Southern Cross” & “aged care”, I knew it was the Knights - I think most of them are just pig-ignorant of anything that isn’t spoon fed to them.
In principle I’m with you, Homer, if you’ve got the time and the expertise to do it, and if the research is fully available. The rest of us, with different qualifications or no qualifications at all, have to go by simpler means of determining if research is bogus or not.
If an ad on TV tells me that research indicates 9 out of 10 dentists recommend Sparklo toothpaste, I’m well within my rights to question the research. If a bunch of conservative anti-abortionists fund and promote an organisation that does research into attitudes to abortion, the same rules apply.
I think that’s a bit unfair to Eva Cox, Tony - she’s shown that she too is concerned about the “abortion is the only solution” discourse - but obviously in a different way than the right - and while wanting to preserve and defend reproductive rights.
The research may well be accurate, but that’s not the point. The point is that nobody can check it. And it’s clearly driven by political motivation.
And we also have to ask how many people spend too much time thinking about this issue. Reading columns in the paper which suggest that Australians are or should be disturbed by the number of terminations may itself be a large factor in creating this climate of opinion. As the Knights obviously recognise!
Liam, Kim Hawtrey wrote the best paper on banks I have seen for sometime.
It was funded by the ABA.
Does that mean I disregard it?
The NSW Teacher’s Federation funded research by tony Vinson.Do I disregard it?
no of course not I look at it and examine it on its merits.
I think Tony is right that these are perfectly plausible results that any pollster would get. For feminists and their opponents questions about whether there are too many abortions or whether we should debate the topic are heavily coded propositions, but ordinary common sense says that there are too many - even totally disregarding the interests of the foetus, what woman wants an abortion if it can be avoided? - and that debating things is unproblematic (we are always being told in almost every context that debate and criticism is good). The average poll respondent would not understand the code and would provide a common sense answer. That a majority still thought abortion on demand was the right policy makes it unlikely that there was a biased sample, as this is what other pollsters are finding.
Homer - Eva Cox’s problem is not only who funded the survey. She has problems with the fact that the questions aren’t being released, nor are they telling us whether respondents were given multiple choice answers to choose from, or whether they were able to give nuanced responses.
As for reporting of the results in the media, there has been a huge difference in focus depending what paper you read. Most are reporting that people think that there are too many abortions - but very few go on to qualify that statement by explaining that most are also happy with the current laws. Almost as if it’s too hard to accept that people may have views of their own that they don’t wish to enforce on society…
Just because they’re plausible doesn’t mean the research that produced them isn’t also questionable. The question isn’t whether there are too many abortions or whether people approve or not, it’s that an entirely unindependent organisation is getting away with putting forward its views without anyone asking critical questions like “who produced this?”
You could trust the Carton United Brewery to do good and accurate research on alcohol consumption, for comparison, but you’d want to know if they had their hands in any research on policy dealing with alcoholism or licencing law.
Southern Cross? Don’t they run pokie clubs in Canberra?
Liam - I’ve now read the executive summary on the Southern Cross website. While it would be good to know the precise questions (you could say the same about polls the SMH publishes, but nobody writes indignant blog posts about those), there is no prima facie evidence that there is anything wrong with this poll. Katharine Betts had a good survey article on abortion attitudes in People and Place last year. In the 2001 Australian Election Survey, 61% of voters agreed with the proposition that women should be able to obtain an abortion readily if they want one. In this survey 62% support abortion on demand. In the AES, if you add in the people who support abortion n ’special circumstances’ you get to 88%, in this survey support for abortion when the baby has a ’severe foetal disability’ is at 85%.
Basically your reasoning seems to be that if the pollster is religous and won’t release all the data yet, there must be something wrong with the survey. It’s the old lefty obsession with motives. As a bit of an empiricist myself, I look to see if there is anything obviously wrong with the data. What I find is that it is almost exactly matching other comparable questions, but usefully probes the nuances of people’s attitudes. If there is no evidence of a crime, why go looking for criminals?
upon reflection I believe that Andrew makes some good points.
Never again will I think Eva Cox has the ability to make a salient point!
Foolish of me to think that was possible!
I have to say as someone who is unreservedly pro-abortion (and yes, I’m not afraid to use that term rather than the euphemistic pro-choice) I can find little to disagree with in Andrew’s analysis of this. the obsession with motives is pointless if there is nothing wrong with the methdology of the study or its plausibility and the poll certainly doesn’t throw up anything wildly implausible either.
The point, Jason and Andrew, is that we can’t really examine the methodology of the study.
and as Andrew has already noted, you can’t examine the methodology of other polls done by the SMH either yet no one writes indigant blog posts about them.
Jason, there’s something a bit different between what purports to be academic research and opinion polling. The claims made for the research suggest that it’s much more comprehensive than polls.
Mark - The academic research claim was made by the SMH - it is not on the Southern Cross website. Sure, they probably conducted the research because they thought, plausibly enough, that people’s views were more nuanced than revealed by the limited questions asked by other pollsters. But the fact that they also found and published results entirely consistent with the previous polling, and consistent with the political position of their opponents (abortion on demand) suggests that they are following good academic ethics. They are offering more detailed poll results for sale on their website. In the interests of having maximum information in this debate I will send off my money. And if you want to see unscholarly advocacy research, just take a look at Eva Cox’s collected works. Somehow she is actually employed by a university.
Speaking of advocacy, Eva Cox is hardly a neutral researcjher herself. She’s a lifelong radical feminist with an agenda of her own.
Odd that you didn’t draw attention to this, Mark. Advocacy research of your own, perhaps?
Oh for God’s sake. Nobody takes seriously either the SMH polls or Eva Cox. And I don’t dispute the findings of the study, they probably are about right. It’s just galling to have such an obviously unindependent organisation written up as if it were as non-partisan as a conference of football umpires.
…
NB. My disdain for Eva Cox is unrelated to the unwarranted abuse she dished out to me at the polling booth we share last election.
Liam - Now we are in agreement! Eva Cox lectures the world about ‘civility’, but she is one of the rudest people I have ever come across.
She aint no expert on polls either so I really should have ignored her.
The one time I heard Eva Cox speak I was massively underimpressed. Still, I think she makes some valid points.
Nevertheless, my point stands.
If the purpose of this post, and the article it quotes, is to criticise the presumed concealment of the ideological bias of the Southern Cross bioethics Institute — then the failure to mention Eva Cox’s blatant ideological bias is the height of hypocrisy.
To respond to your point, EP. Cox is indeed a feminist scholar and this is well known. However this does not invalidate the criticisms she makes. It may influence her choice of this group to criticise, but that’s not something that disables or invalidates the point she is making.
The point is this: trust in social scientific or scientific research is guarenteed by its publicity - that is to say, the availability of the raw data for other researchers to attempt to replicate the conclusions, and the availability of the survey questions so that they can be subjected to validation (a statistical process). Universities have protocols which enable this access, and provide for the retention of data for a period of some years in order to facilitate it. This provides a second level of trust in the reliability of the data and the analysis above and beyond the peer review process.
This point can also be made in response to Andrew and Jason - the fact that such protocols are not normally followed in either political polling or commercial market research, and may not be in privately funded research, provides a legitimate reason to prefer academic research to the results of research which cannot be scrutinised by other researchers whose qualifications and experience enable them to evaluate its reliability and validity.
This is the other point of the post - you, and your Bush administration friends and Christians often pour scorn on the ethical and scientific protocols which regulate research - such as peer reviewing. This is in effect a relativist if not postmodernist position. Of course, it’s applied selectively. You’ve claimed that university research is inferior to the marketplace of ideas on the internet. However, if you were to seek medical treatment for a potentially dangerous ailment, you would presumably repose trust in medical professionals whose diagnosis and treatment are predicated on public, open and replicable research tested through clinical trials and peer review. In other words, there is a very important point at stake in the defence of the protocols which produce trust in expert research and its applications, as well as the other issues which I’m alluding to.
Mark,
1) Eva cox is a scholar? since when?
2)I am not aware of christians pouring scorn on peer reviewing.
I have to say I am unaware of this and given my point of view I doubt that I have missed much.
Where does this criticism come from?
Homer, I think it’s part of the creationist debate in the US.
I don’t know the genesis of the creation debate ( that was for Jason) however My reading of christian websites and publications both here and overseas is quite the opposite.
They welcome peer reviewing and even defending ones position.
Well, perhaps I’m wrong, Homer.
Five points, if I may.
1. Eva Cox is a trained political scientist and a scholar. Just not a very nice one.
2. Peer reviewing is important. Scholarship is important. Transparency is important. Nobody is arguing to the contrary.
3. The first, most important thing primary school teachers teach young people learning how to read is the simple question: “Who wrote this”? It’s the basis of all source-based history and the foundation of evidence. It’s the most powerful question available to empirical readers. It’s important no matter what the quality of the research, the transparency of the methods, or the validity of the data.
5. For fuck’s sake. You’d question anything that I wrote on the grounds of lefty ideological bias, wouldn’t you? I know I certainly would, and I expect to be able to take the same approach to others.
“5. For fuck‚Äôs sake. You‚Äôd question anything that I wrote on the grounds of lefty ideological bias, wouldn‚Äôt you? I know I certainly would, and I expect to be able to take the same approach to others.”
I might question your arguments/interpretations based on your lefty ideological bias, but if you are making a factual statement that accords with known evidence I am not going to discount it simply because I disagree with your politics.
As I think I was suggesting, in any form of scholarship the selection of the object of study (and to some degree the method) will be in part a function of the social and ideological position of the researcher, and ought to be subjected to analysis in and of itself. However, that does not mean that we should adopt a relativistic position as the results of the research can still be evaluated and tested.
Sure, but I’d pick my facts, wouldn’t I?
Nobody’s ever said that the Southern Cross Care lot shouldn’t be able to do research. If they want to, go ahead, research away! They should be subject, though, to the same strictures as the rest of us—which includes having to answer the question: “Hey, before I read this, who are you, what do you do, and who gives you your money”?
This post was written in the leisure time of a history student supported an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship
Of course research should be evaluated and tested.
But we should also take into account the ideological and theoretical biases of those who do the evaluation and testing.
And I still think it is wrong that the article you quoted doesn’t seem to mention Eva Cox’s background. By failing to do so, it commits the same sin that the reporters of the survey committed.
Disclosure:
I heard Eva Cox comment on this issue on RN’s Australia Talks Back.
On this one she is spot on. If you can’t evaluate the methodology and can’t review the questions you should ignore the results. It is as simple as that. Forget they ever existed. It doesn’t matter if they ’sound about right’. If that was a measure you wouldn’t need to do any research.
It is also irrelevant what Ms Cox’s views on other matters and what her manners might be.
So there! I have spoken!
I have spoken!
No you haven’t. You have typed.
Another typical example of left-wing inaccuracy and misrepresentation.
How do you know Brian doesn’t read his comments back to himself aloud?
My studies* indicate that he doesn’t read aloud, he just moves his lips.
* I can’t reveal the details, but they’re based on very accurate surveys.
But who funded your studies, EP?
I think EP’s funding is tuna out of a can, a few cat biscuits and an old blanket to sleep on. That, and a scratch under the chin every now and then. Prrrr.
Does EP know about the strange phenomenon of the ghost cat? I could tell some tales.