Social Research is Good! But the NFU badger cull survey is misleading.

I - of course - like social research, mainly because its my job. But social research can be used to help answer all sorts of interesting questions and contribute to policy decisions. This should be obvious: problems are socially defined - it is society that sets rules about norms of behaviour and what, in general, should happen. Social research is even useful in debates over animal health. In 2007, Defra's Science Advisory Council suggested that Defra needed more social research to help understand issues around behaviour change in all sorts of policy areas, but including animal health and bovine TB - see my paper here.

So, I was pleased to see the NFUs survey of attitudes to badger culling today, but dismayed by the way it represented - see the story here

Here's the reason.

First, the headline in no way matches the findings. Look closely, the press release says that 49% of respondents "agree that bovine TB can be spread to cattle by badgers". It goes on to say that "of those 49 per cent, 62 per cent of people supported a legal cull of badgers in order to control bovine TB". In other words, 30% of respondents were in favour of a cull. This in no way comes close to the claimed "Majority of people back badger cull - survey" headline. Interestingly though it is about the same as the recent BBC survey - see here - which showed that two thirds of the population were against a badger cull. Thats good news - the similar results help provide some legitimacy to the overall findings.

To this the NFU will say but this survey is about looking at the atttudes of people who have somesort of knowledge about TB. And they would point to the fact that of the 49% who agreed that badgers spread TB to cattle 62% agreed with a badger cull. This is fine, but only to a point. You see if you wanted to make that argument then really you would need to ask the respondents a series of questions about their knowledge of TB. As it is, we dont know how may believed in cattle to cattle transmission. It could be that of that 49% percent, half of them didnt believe that cattle to cattle transmission was a problem. If that was the case, then that would also affect the argument that 'knowledgeable' people support a badger cull. But as the survey didnt ask these questions we just dont know. In fact its not clear what question was asked. This is why its always important to do social research properly, or you get misleading answers, or people pointing to 'directions for further research'.

Thirdly, the survey doesnt - from what I can see - go into the circumstances in which a cull is acceptable. People can be in favour of something in principle, but only in certain circumstances or conditions. Added to that is the famous values-action gap: we like to say we would do something, but when it comes down to it we often dont like to go through with it.

Finally, an implicit conclusion to this survey might be: 51% of people are stupid, they need to be educated! Such an attitude is common amongst people who believe in the all pervasive value of 'communication'. In fact studies of risk communication time and again show problems with this deficit model of the public understanding of science. For a start, its only likely that a small proportion of this 51% are going to be open to being persuaded otherwise. Its interesting that the 49% figure is quite similar to Defra research back in the 2000s when members of the public participated in workshops about TB - see here. This stregthened support for a cull, but not by much and even then the participants wanted to put conditions around when it was acceptable (see point 3). Part of the problem then is that these debates are ideological and identity based. Simply shouting knowledge from one side to the other is not going to have much effect. If you never trusted the other side in the first place, you're not going to start now.

So to conclude. I think the NFU should be congratulated on commissioning a piece of social research like this. I think more of it is needed - and not just in relation to bTB. But if its done, it needs to be done properly and headlines need to reflect the findings.