Science confirmed something…maybe.
I noticed The Mercury were running this story today. It’s a bit of fluff about how we’re all going to take sickies during the soccer world cup. But it also contains this claim, “And men, scientists have confirmed you’re often not as ill as you say you are” (emphasis added).
I thought that sounded interesting so I tried to track down the empirical evidence for this claim. The only research that The Mercury article refers to is commissioned by the Sumo Salad franchise. However, this research only seems to include a survey of who takes sickies.
So I did a bit more digging. Eventually I found this story which refered to research commissioned by English insurance company Engage Mutual. There’s a link on their website to what I presume was the original press release here.
Now I’m no scientist, but work with me here. To test a claim like “Men are not as sick as they say they are” you would presumably need to compare some self-rated level of sickness against a physiological or biological measure. For example, men in your experiment might rate themselves as having “the flu”, but you conduct a blood test (or whatever the heck you do) and confirm they only have a common cold. If this pattern is common across your subjects (who are of course representative of the greater population) you can maybe find some support for your claim.
But this is not what the research in question did. The article on the Engage Mutual website reveals that the research consisted of an internet questionnaire conducted by OnePoll. This questionnaire asked men and women for their opinions on whether they thought their partner tended to overstate their symptoms and whinge when sick.
Presuming that OnePoll did conduct this survey using a representative sample, what claim can you make from this? Well, you could perhaps reasonably say that “Women tend to rate their partners as overstating their symptoms when sick”. What you certainly cannot claim is that men actually are not as sick as they say they are. The research simply does not include any measure of actual sickness.
Moral of the story is don’t believe every(any)thing you read about what scientists have “proven” or “confirmed” – it’s probably a load of piffle (trust me, scientists have confirmed it).
On a related note, I’m feeling a bit under the weather at the moment – it’s probably the flu.
June 11, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Your first mistake was choosing to read the Mercury. I suggest that next time you choose to read an actual newspaper, one that actually employs journalists who write about facts and things that happen. This is preferable to one that continually places on the front page things that make a good story, a story for which the truth is only a nagging burden, a worrisome terrier yapping at the heels of pure work of peerless fiction.
June 23, 2010 at 12:00 pm
haha awesome!
It reminds me of a news piece on triple j, that stated that a recent study has shown that people who regularly use mouth wash have a much higher chance of getting mouth cancer. Although, I suspect that a large proportion of the people who use mouthwash are doing so to cover up their smokers breath. So is it mouthwash that causes cancer, or smoking?
Trust me, I’m a scientist
June 30, 2010 at 3:44 pm
They’re only scientists if they are wearing white coats.
scientist claim + white coat = Trust; they are a real scientist
scientist claim – white coat = Avoid; they are a pretend scientist.
No doubt your “scientists” Matt fall into the latter category.
July 29, 2010 at 8:45 pm
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