This is why 'research' shouldn't be taken seriously

Photo by Devon Divine on Unsplash

I’m fascinated with what various researchers can learn about us and the universe around us. I used to accept research as the latest word on what we know simply because I had no reason to doubt it.

Then, I started learning how to understand research a bit, and while I’m far from an expert, I do see a lot of issues.

This is especially true on so-called gun violence research, of course, which I see more of than other types of research, but I see it all over the place.

Usually, the issues include burying any studies that don’t conform to the preferred narrative, whatever that might be, as well as cherry-picking data or structuring research so as to get precisely what you wanted to get all along.

The researchers I’m going to talk about today didn’t seem to do that.

They found a whole new way to blow it.

A new study which found racial minorities living in poor areas actually have a lower risk of mental health problems relating to pregnancy compared to their similarly situated white counterparts shows racism is a “complex” topic, according to the authors.

This paper, published in Social Science and Medicine, hypothesized that residing in “structurally deprived neighborhoods” would be associated with a higher risk of hospital-reported “perinatal mental disorders” for minority populations, while no such association would exist for white mothers due to systemic racism.

“Perinatal” generally refers to the time soon before a birth and up to a year after giving birth.

However, the paper’s authors found that for black, Asian, and Pacific Islander mothers, living in poorer neighborhoods was associated with a lower risk of pregnancy-related mental health problems and that the opposite was true for white mothers.

“Our findings reveal a complex association between structural racism and hospital-reported PMD,” the authors wrote.

They also suggested the “racism-related stress” of living in predominantly white neighborhoods is the cause.

…

Ian Kingsbury, the director of research at medical reform group Do No Harm, criticized the index, calling it “an ideologically loaded endeavor grounded in critical theory” that “supposes that race itself (in addition to income) is a measure of privilege or disadvantage.” This instrument is “unfit for serious scholarship,” he said.

Most of the researchers didn’t respond to emails asking for comment. The one who did simply referred the journalist to the lead researcher, who’d already refused to answer a couple of different emails.

The researchers basically felt they had to struggle to find a way that involved racism rather than just taking the data as it was.

I mean, hell, if anything, it suggests that maybe new black mothers are better adjusted than white women, at least in poorer communities. That sounds like it would be a good thing for black folks in general.

But they can’t do that. They simply have to try and make it racist, and when that failed, they decided to twist the data to say that “racism is complex” and still attribute that data to racism itself.

Yes, white women in white neighborhoods are absolutely dealing with depression because of their racist environment.

That made me roll my eyes so far backward into my head I got to watch the Battle of Hastings take place.

The issue here isn’t the findings in and of themselves, and I do credit the researchers for not just refusing to publish what they found. As I already said, that happens a great deal.

The issue is the twisting of the data to fit a narrative, and it was still published.

This is what passes for good research in the social sciences these days. Never mind that social science has a major problem with its research already, namely that they can’t get any of their experiments to pan out the same way twice; they also do this BS.

At no point is there any real evidence of racism at play. White women are the ones coming up short here, and rather than just say, “There’s no racism here,” they have to twist reality like a pretzel to make that case.

In this world, there’s enough real racism that you shouldn’t have to manufacture it like this. Unless, of course, I’m wrong and there’s not.

But no, that can’t be the case, now can it?

Regardless, this is what so-called researchers are churning out, and as a result, I don’t believe any study until I read it for myself, can find no flaw in its methodology, and no issues with how the data was interpreted.

I hate being cynical like this because it’s not my way. I’m an optimist, really. I want to see the best in all things.

I just can’t anymore. I’ve seen too much to chalk it all up to good-faith mistakes. This is by design, and it’s why “research” is now a synonym for propaganda most of the time, at least in my mind.

No, it shouldn’t be, but it is, and the so-called researchers are why that’s the case.

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