Working Up A Thirst

At the end of a recent newspaper article came this one final hurdle:

“The Roy Morgan research was based on a telephone survey last month with a random sample of 687 people aged 14 years and over.”

One’s response to this information neatly divides humanity into two groups: those curious about the story behind the research, and those cranky about such drivellingly small research sample numbers.

I’m in the second camp, and I don’t think it really matters what this research was about. Yet to assuage the ever-curious let me tell: the research concerned “Two Million Australians [who] Drink Before Ten.”

Put this way the research seems quite damning. What sort of a country do we live in where only two millions of us are drinking before 10pm each night? What a bunch of lemon-tea drinking pussies we’ve become.

But it’s not that sort of ten. It is not ten o’clock in the post-meridian; but rather ten years old in the scale of life. The research indicated that two million Australians under the age of ten are drinking alcohol in some way, shape or form. And the concern extrapolated is that these children run a very great risk of developing drinking problems later in life.

The Church and the Government and some new regulations and federal health guidelines all had something to do with this story, too; but let’s put that to one side. I want to get back to the real problem. The research.

Firstly, I’m not going to be all hiss and spit about these findings – certainly not. Indeed in one regard I take my hat off to this man Roy Morgan.

Admittedly he had a month, but randomly ringing up 687 people over the age of 14 and asking them if they’d had a drink before they were ten and then asking them – should the response come in the affirmative – if they are now a barrister or are they now unemployed with a drinking problem, well, as I think we can all see, it’s top-rate data-gathering. Based on such data the research findings are as irrefutable as the existence of the newspaper article itself.

Yet on the other hand - what a world. What a statistical and interpretive achievement to bend a logarithm so much that it can turn 687 people over the age of 14 into 20 million Australians. And what a fabulous mathematical formula must it be to account for all of those Australian who don’t have a phone or don’t answer it – or who tell Roy Morgan to stop ringing them at dinner time and to please delist their number form his data base…

This is yet more chicken-before-egg sort of stuff. It’s designed to keep massaging the guilt-trip-come-moral-imperative of alcohol abuse along through the news media. No doubt such research keeps this Roy Morgan chap in gold-plated spats, but I wonder how it serves to save a single person from a career in alcohol.