I’m writing this blog on the day of the most interesting election in decades. The old tennis match of British politics, with the ball being knocked across the net every 5 or 10 years, has been replaced by World of Warcraft- a new political landscape which the old guard doesn’t understand and are frantically asking the young people to help them with. By the time you read this there will be more claims of legitimate power than an episode of ‘Game of Thrones’ and the majority of the UK will say they are underrepresented by the resulting government, assuming there is one at all!
Representation is key to politics, candidates are voted for because they represent the views of the voter, and are then tasked with doing so in parliament. Claims of representing the views of the populace then justify, rightly or wrongly, many of the decisions made in parliament. Every party claims to represent the people, so who is telling the truth? How do they know they are representing people’s views? This issue of representation is something that I myself have been grappling with throughout my research. So let’s consider some of the ways in which this can be done.
One of the ways I am attempting to discover how social enterprises impact upon people’s health is through analysing social impact reports. After searching through all available reports, only 17 were found to be written by social enterprises in Scotland which, I would guess, forms only a tiny fraction of the sector. So can the results of my analysis be claimed to be representative?
Perhaps they can in the same way that Ed Miliband claims the existence of a labour surge, based on the people he has spoken to “up and down the country”. Ed is a busy man and can only speak to so many people. Of the total population of people that he is capable of speaking to, the vast majority have told him that they will be voting for him. I recognise that there are other factors influencing who those people happen to be but, limitations aside, is there anything wrong with the conclusion he has derived from his research?
Another method I am using is to focus on case studies of three organisations in an attempt to understand context-specific factors relevant to the work and impacts of social enterprises. This process of focusing on very few areas and attempting to garner data which is relevant to the entire country appears very similar to UKIP’s election policy. Nigel Farage tends to focus his research on certain constituencies and is truthfully told by residents there of their support for him. He then generalises those findings to the whole country. Is there anything inherently wrong with this method?
My third stream of research involves interviewing ‘industry experts’ regarding their views on the potential cross-overs between public health and social enterprise. I am considering them as interested parties who have a strategic knowledge of each sector and the ramifications of any decisions affecting them. It is not difficult to see the similarities to David Cameron’s use of the open letter signed by thousands of small business owners claiming to represent the sector and warning of the dire consequences of voting Labour. Are the Tories wrong to use this result for campaign purposes?
The answer to the above questions is no. Their methods appear valid and there is nothing to suggest the results have been tampered with. So why have they arrived at three different conclusions? The difference between me and these politicians is that I would like to arrive at one particular conclusion and I don’t know what it is yet, whereas they want to arrive at three conclusions knowing exactly what they want them to be. They are conducting research to arrive at a result which is already known. Which begs the question, how is it known? How do they know they are representing the people without knowing what the people want? One hypothesis is that they don’t know what the people want, they don’t care about representation and they are justifying their own ideological standpoints through a façade of research.
But I would need to test that hypothesis so I don’t get labelled a hypocrite, or even worse, a politician.
(Stop Press! In light of the monumental differences between the opinion polls and today’s result, perhaps it’s not just politicians that need to consider their research methods!)