theolduvaigorge: Beware the bad survey: Science literacy isn’t as bad as the statistics make i
theolduvaigorge: Beware the bad survey: Science literacy isn’t as bad as the statistics make it lookby Cassie Barton“Read the catchy one-line statistics that circulate in the headlines and on social media and you’d be forgiven for thinking that public understanding of science is in a sorry state. A few months back, we heard that 80% of Americans want a warning label on any food that “contains DNA”. Earlier on, a poll found that 65% endorse the good old you-only-use-one-tenth-of-your-brain myth. And here in the UK, teachers seem to believe all kinds of brain myths, including a substantial minority (29%) who think that failing to drink enough water will literally shrink your brain.Typically, these statistics have a short life cycle. They get used by journalists for amusing articles, grumbled about by science-y people on Twitter, and fade away before being resurrected, half-remembered, at dinner parties. Rarely does anyone take a critical look at where these statistics come from and whether they’re worth listening to. Which is ironic, because anyone who makes it their mission to debunk bad science needs to be just as wary of the bad survey.When the DNA-labelling statistic came out, Ben Lillie wrote an excellent blog post pointing out that it was probably an artefact of poor survey design, since plenty of other studies suggest that most people know perfectly well what DNA is. He was dead right – polling is an inexact science at best, and if a finding looks too good (or bad) to be true, it usually is. Here are some of the major hurdles that most of these studies seem to trip over.Non-attitudesIt’s no secret that people say stuff on surveys that they don’t really believe. Social scientists even have a word for what you end up with: a ‘non-attitude’.Let’s take the DNA-labelling finding as an example of how non-attitudes come about. It’s from a survey about attitudes to food issues, part of a question where people are asked whether they support a long list of policies. Crucially, “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA” is the only silly policy on the list – the others are plausible ideas, like taxing sugary foods and labelling what country meat comes from” (read more).(Source: PLoS Blogs) -- source link