It is fashionable, on the Internet at any rate, to boast of how much “research” you have done on a particular issue. It is also fashionable to caricature this in various ways: savvy parents upending the experts, know it all scientists looking down on what they see as the unwashed masses. See Jenny McCarthy.
Here’s the problem:
90% of “mommy research” is bullshit, and always will be.
The phenomenon relies on false assumptions: that the Internet has democratized information; that it is all available and we can all access it. This is true, at least it is if you have access to a university with journal and full text access. The lie is that we are equipped to analyze and understand this information. Very few of us are. It is considered “elitist” to object to parents doing their own research (or, in more extreme circumstances, arguing against it will get you called a shill for Big Pharma or whatever medical/scientific group is pertinent to the situation).
Most parents do not have an intensive scientific education; they do not have the ability to judge whether a study was well done or relevant. I don’t. I’ve read enough about scientific research to spot the major howlers, but there are hundreds of errors that could be made that I wouldn’t spot. I took basic statistics in college, and if you start talking about a chi-square I’ll more or less understand you, but at this point in life I have to assume that the writer and editors checked their math—I certainly couldn’t redo it.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. That assumes that they’ve actually gone to the trouble of finding the full text and the studies. Many, if not most, of the people claiming to have done “research” haven’t done this. Perhaps they’ve trawled through abstracts on PubMed. Or, more likely and worse, they’ve read predigested popular books on the topic. So they’ve got someone else’s opinion about a selection of studies on the topic. They don’t know if there were other studies that were excluded from the discussion (or why); they don’t know about dissenting views. But on some forums, this level of reading qualifies as “research”. At this level, you aren’t doing research for yourself; you’re reading opinions and deciding who you want to trust.
From that point, the conclusions get simplified, and passed along like talismans.
A recent thread on a large and popular parenting forum is fairly typical. A woman, in her first pregnancy, went to the obstetricians at a famous hospital. She did not like their policies, and switched. Now, some time later, she wants to write them a letter. The research she’s using to back her up? Henci Goer’s The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth. She wants her OBs to read this. Henci Goer is not a medical professional; she’s a doula, childbirth educator, and writer. Her OBs will not take her seriously (and I told her so).
The kicker is that the policies she was complaining about are not universally accepted in obstetrics, and she could have found research to support her—if she had been willing to do real work, which she wasn’t. (Her issues were continuous EFM for all mothers, and an NPO policy.)
The cEFM example is also an illustration of how research is filtered and simplified. On this forum, it will be stated that cEFM has no advantages; that it increases Caesarean sections without better outcomes. That’s not quite true. There’s a Cochrane review on EFM, mainly based on a major, well done trial, and it did conclude that cEFM did not improve outcomes. However, it was performed on low risk women, with 1:1 labor support, on a specific schedule. So, cEFM does not provide advantages for those women, under those conditions. We don’t know what the advantages might be in other situations, because it wasn’t addressed.
The real head-banger is when people claim to have been “researching” vaccination. That’s worthy of a post in itself; maybe I’ll write it sometime.
