All Annotations of FT.com / Columnists / John Kay - Research that aids publicists but not the public[Preview]

saved bytony curzon price on 2007-10-31

• This is the age of the bogus survey. I woke up recently to the news that 95 per cent of children in Britain had been victims of crime. Of course they had. From a legal perspective, pushing a classmate or taking a pencil without the intention of returning it is a crime. School playgrounds are hotbeds of crime and always have been.

  The difference between the bogus survey and real research is that real research has the objective of yielding new information, while bogus surveys are designed to generate publicity. The organisation that had undertaken this bogus survey – I forbear from mentioning its name – did not disguise that it had done so in order to draw attention to the problem of abuse of children.

• Newspapers, broadcasters and consultants will start to distinguish bogus surveys from substantive knowledge only when their audience demonstrates that it knows the difference. Academics and think-tanks need to be reminded that generating publicity is not a legitimate research objective.