Science and Politics

There is a particularly sad post on danah boyd’s blog today. Basically danah has run up against the problem that if the results of your research are deemed politically unacceptable you’ll be told to go back and do it again until you get the “right” answer.

I’m used to folks dismissing qualitative work because they don’t understand it, but I’ve never before witnessed so many people reject solid quantitative studies done by reputable organizations that are replicated with different sampling techniques across different studies. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect someone to say to me, “Go find other data.” More frequently, as if in a refrain, folks are trying to reject the studies in this report as “old” and “outdated” even though the report makes it clear that the findings paint a consistent portrait and unreleased data show similar patterns. It’s as if nothing would satiate critics who can’t imagine that the real dangers are different than have been portrayed over the years.

And what are these hideously unacceptable results? That the Internet does not, in fact, get kids into trouble, it just makes it easier for us to see that they are in trouble.

Go read the whole thing yourself. It is a salutary lesson in the way the world works.

Update: Gary Farber blogged about the report last week and nailed what’s going on pretty well.