Earlier this week at New Matilda, I explored the growing problem of the media’s fascination with corporate-backed reports and surveys. There’s already been plenty of discussion here about the BCA report into emissions trading, and my colleage Ben Pobije put a satirical skewer through Bernard Salt’s pop demography.
I want to specifically have a look at BankWest and the latest edition of that bank’s so-called “Quality of Life Index”. This report got a massive free kick from a range of media outlets. Even the ABC had no problem covering the report, making sure they included the corporate sponsor’s brand when referring to the “BankWest Quality of Life Index” on ABC TV news, before going on to give BankWest executive Ian Corfield some free media on the national broadcaster. A Google News search on this topic yielded 167 mentions — not bad going for a report that has some serious methodological flaws.
The BankWest study because it shows just how easily busy journalists and credulous media outlets can be taken in by what appears to be rigorous research. The media reported the findings of the report with little analysis of what it actually said, and no examination of the dubious reasoning behind its impressive league tables of best and worst local government areas in the nation. “The BankWest Quality of Life Index has debunked the myth of Australians’ ‘sea-change’ and ‘tree-change’ desires,” is how the ABC story led.
No, it hasn’t. The Quality of Life Index is not a survey of Australians’ desires. It contains absolutely no market research, survey polling or indeed any investigation of where Australians would like to live. Instead, it is a league table of local government areas based on a fairly rudimentary formula that compiles and combines 10 different statistics from published sources like the ABS.
Pause for just a moment to look at these statistics and you’ll immediately notice some very surprising assumptions built into them. Take the housing category, for instance. One of the 10 indicators for “quality of life” is the percentage of detached houses in a particular municipal area. Houses = good, apartments = bad. Even the shabbiest shack without water or electricity apparently conveys a much better quality of life than a sumptuous Gold Coast apartment. (This, incidentally, is probably the reason the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs score near the bottom of the 590 Australian municipalities in the Index: unsurprisingly, they have almost no detached houses.)
A second category used to calculate the formula is housing vacancies, or “empty homes” as the BankWest authors, with their fingers on our heartstrings, so charmlessly describe them. Municipalities with low rates of “empty homes” are ranked higher than local government areas with high rates. Of course, not many people want to live in a ghost town. But it’s not clear why extremely low rates of housing vacancies are a good thing — just ask the residents of Port Hedland, as Four Corners’ Matthew Carney did the other night.
The increased scrutiny being accorded significant reports like the BCA’s recent emissions trading paper is a welcome development. There should be more of it. If you’re interested, I go into more detail about the BankWest report at New Matilda.
Is it just me, or is there something hopelessly Western Australian about a survey that assumes detached housing, ie. a suburban existence, is necessarily an indicator of high quality of life? I’d think that way too if I’d spent my life on the banks of the Swan River.
BBB
Could just as easily be Qld, if that’s the case. There are very few apartment buildings in Brisbane older than the 60s, and almost zilch in the way of semi-detached and terrace houses.
The ABC has been caught retailing corporate garbage before… and it almost certainly will be again.
Indeed its default poverty stricken acceptance policy appears to fluctuate now between corporate PR handouts and then the likes of Pilger and Hitchens as ‘opposing’ views on late.
I blame the education system.
What’s even more striking is not the inclusions but the omissions. They construct indexes in which the benefits (or costs, for that matter) of living by the beach or in the bush are ignored altogether and then conclude that the quality of life by the beach is not as good as claimed.
If you bought their social indicators an obvious interpretation would be that the benefits of living by the sea are so great that people are prepared to move to areas that are unappealing in other respects to get them.
Whoops! You said pack of Bankers.
This is incorrect. The correct collective noun for Bankers is a wunch.
It seems to me that there are a couple of issues here:
1. Journalists are under-resourced and when presented with a quick story, will go for it. That’s not hard to understand.
2. Journalists, as a group, don’t know jack about interpreting quantitative research.
1 is a structural problem. 2 is a problem for journalism faculties around the country.
Absolutely John Q.
Thanks Ben! I had a look at the survey myself last week and thought the same thing – like the Sydney CBD, the Waverley LGA at 259 is just another glaring pointer to how the survey has like, no relationship to reality or real estate, for that matter.
Waverley LGA has a substantial stock of flats, units and apartments and a good percentage of renters compared to say neighbouring Woollahra, which itself was obviously marked down due to having more apartments and units compared to say Mosman and Hunters Hill closer to the top of the index.
One can only imagine that many home buyers currently trudging around the streets of Waverley or couples looking at buying a unit at Bondi Beach are grimly hoping that Waverley house prices reflect this survey’s 259th ranking. Lotsa luck on that one.
Robert – are you implying they DO know how to interpret qualitative research?
You could probably have just stopped at ‘interpreting’.
Ben Pobije :: very fine work, you scarce man, you
Thanks John, it’s a great point about the omissions. One of the most notable here is complete absence of any indicators looking at, say, access to leisure, sporting or arts facilities. This is disappointing given that much of the activity of local government is devoted to improvinb the amenity of their municipalities through the provision of parks, libraries, pools and other sports grounds, arts centres and so on.
Yes. A survey designed to sell mortgages finds that areas with large, detatched houses are best to live in. Surprising.
I remember listening to an interview with Ian Corfield on News Radio about this (with significant incredulity). Apparently they didn’t include ratings of such things as ‘cultural facilities’ because it was too hard to measure… Quality of Life Index my arse.
And while we’re discussing pop demography, I take my Bernard with a pinch of salt.
Presaging the next condemn thread, I condemn everything he says and does. Society is not a layer cake of BBs, Xs, Ys and Zs each growing up as blank slates, quarantined from the past.
Its a research outlook gained from standing on the shoulders of pygmies.
“Its a research outlook”
You’re too kind.
As a (former) banker, may I suggest that the post should be re-named “A useless pack of ABC researchers” (I am not sure what the correct collective noun should be for ABC researchers).
The right culprits are those that are so lazy as to elect to use this sort of stuff, not the bankers that produced it in the hope that it is picked up.
Andrew – I agree, the media is certainly culpable for picking up this kind of thing and runnig hard with it. Today for instance we’re seeing a similar thing with the recent architects’ policy on urban planning. Never-the-less, I think it is disappointing that a well-resourced institution like a bank can’t put a little more effort into rigorous research.
The correct collective noun for ABC researchers is clearly “a fiction of ABC researchers”.
C’mon – this is a team sport striving for the lowest common denominator. Groups do crappy research because they know they can get away with it and the news media will snaffle up any dross that’s served as long it has an angle that can be reported as “news”.
My recent abode was in a town that topped the regional list, much to my surprise. But I know that census stats show a very low percentage of retirees remain living in the place which suggests to me that it is somewhat lacking in the Bankwest scheme of things.
I have a similar problem with these bank surveys of ‘business and consumer confidence’ which always get a trot with the journos. Quite often they are contradictory from one week to the next.
For an alternative take on Quality of Life research: Deakin’s Australian Centre on Quality of Life (although I don’t think they rank suburbs and it’s quantitative research).