Me-culture in the name of science
The BBC were reporting today a government message that “People in their 30s and 40s are worse than those in their 20s at knowing when to stop drinking”. If you wanted to assess whether this was the case what would you do? Perhaps you might find out the alcohol limits of a sample of people, then find out how much they drank and how often. The results would be a bit complicated — after all, how does one person going over their limit once by 50% compare to someone else going over their (different) limit twice by 25%? — but at least you’d have some evidence to work with.
But in today’s me-culture this is not how an investigation works. Instead, the government commissioned a polling company to ask individuals whether they thought they drank too much:
One in three of the 30 to 50-year-olds surveyed said that drinking too much had wrecked a night out for them at least once in the past year, and 44% said they hadn’t learned to stick to the recommended number of drinks.
The number for under-30s was 40%, by the way.
All of which might be biased by (a) 30-50 year olds being more ready to admit to their drinking errors, (b) under-30s believing more that alcoholic excess is the definition of a good night out, (c) 30-50 year olds being more aware of what their limit should be (or even that it exists), and indeed any number of other things I’ve missed.
Of course, working to reduce alcoholic excess is a good thing. And the government also notes that “NHS admissions for 35 to 49-year-olds with alcohol-related conditions have risen from around 50,000 in 2002/03 to 75,000 in 2005/06″ which is real evidence, as opposed to opinion. But peddling opinion as fact is a bad thing, and it damages the work of others who are doing the more difficult job of collecting and interpreting real data, and so allowing us to make well-informed decisions. The more we continue allowing surveys to pass for what they aren’t, the more likely we are to build our society on superstition and prejudice.
