Research Methods

All studies are not created equal. That much is self-evident. We frequently hear things reported in the media that pass before our eyes as uncontested bits of "wisdom" and "truth". We accept these things because we expect reporting to be accurate, studies to be honest, and "science" to be unequivocal. Sadly, this is rarely the case. Research methods are one of the most important measures available to evaluate politically motivated studies. My professor would be so proud.

How do we go about testing the viability of a study? Most importantly, a studies findings, for it to be sound, has to be reproducible. Someone else has to be able to take the same data, crunch the numbers, and come up with the same results. This is what they mean when they say, "peer review". For most of us, however, that's simply impossible. Not only do we not have the time, we also don't have access to all of the data or the understanding and expertise required to reproduce a result. Instead, we leave that up to the experts.

That does not mean, however, that we are hopelessly futile and mindless automatons that are forced to absorb information as it appears before us. Instead, we must be critical of studies and data that is produced always wondering: What is the angle? Who benefits? What are the politics? Sometimes, good scientists can be corrupted by political processes that are ongoing around them.

Why am I talking about this? Well, it's quite simple. See, one thing about my mother is that she has a habit of cutting interesting articles out of the paper or magazines and slipping them to the appropriate child that would be interested. As she reads this blog and she's sitting firmly on the other side of the aisle when it comes to things like abortion, stem cell research, and birth control in Africa, she selected two such articles from a gloriously obfuscating publication called Citizen Magazine. It's a publication produced by Family.org which just happens to be founded and operated by Neo-conservative Christian fundamentalist nutjob James Dobson. In my view, he's the worst kind of *sshole: dangerous ideas combined with an extensive media empire that he uses to proliferate his curmudgeony ways.

At any rate, the first article I read was about condoms in Africa. It's essentially a long story about how a Harvard professor crunched data from Uganda and concluded that, in that country, condoms didn't slow AIDS, abstinence and faithfulness did. The results of this study, however, have been squashed by the US Agency for International Development - a curious result indeed from a President who firmly believes in abstinence. That's a story right there. But, that's not enough for a political rag like Citizen. Instead, they have to go further and make the argument that the author of the story CLEARLY DOES NOT, which is that if abstinence works in Uganda, it could work all across Africa, ergo, we don't need to kill unborn babies by preventing sperms from invading uteri and invading those helpless eggs. Reading the article, one gets the distinct impression that USAID is intentionally hiding the results of the study because they're concerned about just that. From the authors view, either USAID is made up of a bunch of horny bastards who want the world to go on and continue f*cking each other silly, or they're trying to protect the business interests of the legion of companies that sell condoms to AID for distribution in Africa. One such company even makes sex toys and pornography! Scandalous, I know.

At any rate, being of sound mind and having an anti-moron microchip firmly attached to my frontal lobe, I waited and waited as I read the article until I reached the money quote. Finally, it came, "...Uganda is the one country...that did not rely primarily on condoms." (Elipse is theirs, not mine.) I already knew this to be true. I wrote a paper earlier in the year about population rates which included a brief review on the effectiveness of condoms, so I was fully aware of the wild successes that condoms had played in slowing population growth in Africa. At the same time, no one was saying, "give them condoms, problem solved." There were issues of gender and poverty directly tied to population growth and HIV spread in Africa (and elsewhere) that no on was ignoring, even if the right thinks they are. So, when I found the quote buried in that article, I thought, at least the author hasn't checked all of his scruples at the door. And see, here's the rub. This is why research methods matters. This is why I'm ranting:

Just because abstinence was the critical variable in Uganda for slowing the spread of AIDS, DOES NOT mean it will be the critical variable elsewhere.

In short, the results of the study are not likely to be reproducible elsewhere because of a unique confluence of variables that exist only in Uganda. Fidelity was a "time honored cultural practice" in Uganda that had somehow been lost. They were, in short, preconditioned to accept messages about abstinence and faithfulness. The same can not be said about other sub-Saharan African countries. Egregiously, the Harvard scientist gives Citizen a money quote that supports their anti-sex fascism and is completely without merit (since his study did not look at all of Africa, only Uganda): "You cannot show that more condoms have led to less AIDS in Africa." Funny since he didn't study "Africa".

(As an aside, there is another problem with his data as well. He only looked at condoms provided via Western donors. Since Uganda was poor and could not afford to buy condoms and did not receive much aid in the 80s, it appears that there were few condoms available. That appearance, however, is incorrect. Condoms were available and it's likely that people used them. Unless one is foolhardy enough to believe that the global tradition of marriage infidelity suddenly ceased in one part of the world, then people started protecting themselves.)

At any rate, I found the whole enterprise and exercise in dishonest journalism. Of course there is politics at play on both sides. That's not this issue. But Citizen appears to have the same journalistic standards as Fox News.

I'm not going to go into full details about the stem cell article because this post is already long enough. So here's the synopsis: The cultural right wants to only conduct research with adult stem cells because they don't kill babies. They back up their claim by pointing to the research successes of adult stem cells. The scientific community says, yeah, great, but embryonic stem cells offer greater potential, even if it's much harder to research. Oh, and we're not killing babies because embryo's aren't babies, jackass. (Excuse the flippancy, but the cultural right piss me off with their oh so Christian dishonesty.) Anyway, the article is a one-off that basically does what the right always does: it stacks up a series of successes from adult stem cell research, points to the few successes from embryonic stem cells, and claims the moral high ground, all the while couching it as a vast left wing conspiracy that keeps the public from knowing the truty. In short, it's barely resembles journalism. But what do you expect from a Dobson rag?