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Viewpoint: Manipulator or messenger?Nick Tanner ‘Market research is becoming more of a manipulator than a messenger.’ This was the theme of a recent Debating Group debate sponsored by the MRS (Goldacre vs. Page 2009). At first sight it seems, to us insiders, almost laughably easy to refute. We do our best to make our questions neutral, our analysis thorough and our opinions clearly demarcated from the data. Don’t we? Moreover, the industry has worked hard in recent years to persuade the newspapers to report political opinion polls more responsibly. Methodological details are published, more often than not, and the more outlandish analysis has been tempered. So far, so good. But it’s vital to recognise the limitations of that ‘so far’. Market research and opinion surveys are now routinely used by the media as a source of stories, and by client public relations departments as a source of cheap publicity – indeed, often free publicity, when the stories they generate are a by-product of the original research and not fundamental to the objectives. And perhaps therein lies the problem. These stories are rarely subject to the constraints now applied to the reporting of opinion polls and, as a result, they often end up drawing the most ludicrous conclusions from data that were never intended to support them. Hence we find stories berating the quality of history teaching, founded on a survey which discovered that‘only just over a third (37 per cent) [of children aged 11–16] knew that the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, with many drastically underestimating the death toll’. This shows, according to the Daily Mail (2009), that ‘a shocking number of pupils aged between 11 and 16 have a poor understanding of the Holocaust … The Holocaust is specified on the National Curriculum as a subject that secondary school pupils must be taught.’ What the Mail omitted to mention, perhaps because it would have destroyed the story, is that the Holocaust features in the National Curriculum at key stage 4 – that is, for children aged over 14.Over half the sample, therefore, would not yet have studied it. The data are, presumably, accurate, but the conclusion is manipulative. The market research industry’s usual response is to point out that these distortions are the fault of journalists, of PR executives, of … well, anyone but market researchers. Again, so far, so good – and for some time this was also the defence offered in the old days of misreported political opinion polls. But the polling organisations saw that they had to come up with something better than this if they were to preserve their reputations. Perhaps the rest of the industry now needs to do the same. Of course, it’s difficult: there are contractual obligations of confidentiality, not to mention commercial considerations. If an agency goes public with its refutation of a client’s PR story, what are the odds on said client soon becoming an ex-client? But please, isn’t it about time the industry started admitting that this is not just ‘someone else’s problem’ – that the reputation of market research suffers when it is misused, and that unless the problem is tackled, it will only get worse? References Nick Tanner was a founding director of research agency Parker Tanner though he maintains contact through the Research Network. International Journal of Market Research 51(5), 2009
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