Giving 'research' a bad name

This morning I was catching up with yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, and a piece caught my eye on shopping. It was based on a survey about women shoppers. Men weren't included, because apparently, say the researchers, women do nearly all the shopping in the world - well, 60% and that's near enough to all, isn't it? Plus women are involved in 90% of buying decisions. (That seems to me to leave a hell of a lot of this buying power in the hands of men, but I'm only a trainee researcher, so what would I know?

Now this survey was of a huge number of women - 50! can you believe it? It must have taken, like, weeks to interview and code the data. Just as well they didn't do a really significant number, like 500, or 5000. And it showed that shoppers (well, those 50 women shoppers, anyway) can be divided into five categories: Ms Go and Grab (hates shopping), The Hunter (loves bargains), Seeking Retail Therapy (in need of a treat), The Girls' Day Out shopper and The Lone Browser.

So, I wondered, where do I fit? I shop when I need to, don't particularly love or hate it, and don't miss it if I don't go because I don't need anything. What a load of rubbish, I thought further. I can't believe that people are writing books on the basis of this garbage andgetting them published. And, presumably, other people are buying those books.

And then I saw the name of the researcher: Stella Minahan. Now you probably don't know that name, but she hit the papers here earlier this week. She's researching knitting in Australia (and, according to some reports, how the Internet has influenced knitting), but she's only interested in female knitters under the age of 40. Requests from me and from my friends and acquaintances to explain what exactly it is she's trying to research, how she's going to conduct her research, and why she's limiting herself to younger women have gone unanswered. She seems to have some idea that women are using knitting to build communities, which I think is perfectly true and well worth investigating, but is under the misapprehension that only young women are involved in stitch'n'bitch type groups.

Well, it's understandable really. Older women don't use the internet, because they're scared of it, right? And of course they all knit from patterns the way they were taught as children, right? And they're not as interesting as younger women, right? And they never ever go out to cafes to knit because they don't have enough confidence. They sit at home and moulder quietly away by themselves. I have the feeling that she didn't interview any older women about her shopping theories either. That could be why I couldn't find myself in her five categories.

Now, I know, she's perfectly entititled to do any research she gets funding for - of course, the question of who does fund this shoddy research is a whole other story. But I'm perfectly entitled to ask questions about her methods, methodology, research questions and conclusions. That's what it means to do research: it means that you publish and then wait for the response. By taking her half-understood and badly explained story to the two biggest dailies in Australia (plus numeroous radio stations), and then by refusing to reply to genuine enquirers she has opened herself up to criticisms of ageism.

Comments

[jussi]

sounds like someone who has already formed her theories, now needs to find the right "sample" to prove them. Lies, damned lies and statistics.Maybe we should invite her to SSK, turn her theories on their head huh!

[Julie]

Wow - I'm offended by her biased use of a particular focus group and I don't even live in Australia!

[Adele]

What makes her think that we always shop according to the same "type"? Depending on my mood and what I'm shopping for, I fit any of those categories.

[Peter]

You want me to have an apophyxic fit in anger of this one. I detest faulty research of all kinds, especially when it gets introduced to the gen. public. They have a right to expect good studies & I believe we, as researchers, need to point out the cut corners & add caveats when we know our results will not be whole. I have in my studies, why can't this clown do the same. Boy! have I had a grumpy day.

[Fiona]

Hear hear! I was amused by this in the SMH article -

"Fans of the book started the first StitchnBitch groups in the US and the trend spread to Europe, particularly Sweden and Switzerland, and has now reached Japan and Australia."

Becuase goodness, I've only been seeing articles that say the exact same thing about SnB for the last 5 years.

[thestripeytiger]

Hey Witty, I emailed Stella Minehan in response to said SMH article offering links to the wollongong snb blog and discovered that not only is the research agist... Her research assistant said that they are only interested in MELBOURNE groups at present!! Wonder who is funding that research??

[fillyjonk]

This reminds me of all the breathless newspaper articles about how the new knitting trend is "not your granny's knitting," as if noone over the age of 40 (and more likely, in the US at least, 30) could possibly contribute anything worthwhile or of interest.

It makes me angry, because frankly, the coolest and most interesting (to me at least) people I know fall into the dreaded "granny" age group (and what age group IS that? Where I live, women in their early 40s may be grannies if they have kids young, and their kids have kids young...)

And the knitting I love the most is the very traditional sort - lace shawls, old old Shetland patterns, things that recall the artistry or cleverness of people years ago.

I just live in hope that some of these "new knitters" learn that knitting is a lot more than fuzzy scarves and I-pod cozies, and that there are those of us who are not interested in their pomo theories about "why hip young people take up a craft that was, like, totally unhip before they 'rehabilitated' it"

[fillyjonk]

Actually, the funding thing may be the crux of the issue, now that I think about it.

I'm an ecologist. Five years ago, if I had chosen to research the global carbon cycle, I could have been rolling in (grant) dough. If I chose now to research emerging diseases or invasive species, I could be rolling in grant dough. But because I'm interested in what I'm interested in (remnant prairie and a few rather weedy native species), it's almost impossible for me to get even small amounts of funding for my work.

I suspect the same "flavor of the month" thing is true in all branches of research, and she may just be having to go where the money is.

Unfortunate, really.

And at any rate, I chafe at putting people into "pigeonhole" categories based on research - people are a lot more complex and ornery than "five personality types" or "seven kinds of knitters"