Research findings can be twisted on purpose, academics warned

 

Lay people and politicians often misrepresent research findings and make incorrect arguments, says a researcher. (Freepik pic))

PETALING JAYA: Academics need to be more careful how their research findings are presented, says an academic after a PAS leader stirred controversy by citing a research paper to blame corruption on non-Malays.

Melati Nungsari, a researcher with the Asia School of Business, said there was a tendency for lay people and politicians to misrepresent research findings and make incorrect arguments.

Such a practice made it dangerous for academicians to put out new information, as people might not have fully read the findings and understood how the study was conducted.

Her comments come in the wake of a PAS central committee member, Mohd Zuhdi Marzuki, using a research paper as a basis to defend party president Abdul Hadi Awang’s claim that non-Muslims and non-Bumiputeras were the root of corruption.

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Zuhdi had said that a 2017 economics study had revealed that non-Malays formed 88% of 449 convicted bribe givers between 2010 and 2014.

However, Melati said Zuhdi had not paid attention to the methodology as the paper clearly stated that “the findings cannot be generalised to the entire Malaysian population”.

She said: “With quantitative research papers, people tend to pick numbers because they really want to hear things like this amount of people did this and that type of people did that.”

Such cherry-picking meant there could be a tendency among some people to distort the findings to their advantage.

How academicians published their research papers mattered, she said.

“We (academicians) now need to strike a balance between researching interesting issues and communicating the findings to the public in a way that they won’t misunderstand.”

However, with politicians having their own motives and incentives, Melati was unsure whether any proactive steps by researchers would be effective.

“So it becomes a dilemma for academicians whether they should study an important yet controversial topic even though it will provide some useful findings,” she added.

Another researcher, Benjamin Loh of the Asia Centre research institute, said the media must be more proactive in such a situation rather than just present politicians’ version of research findings.

“Just because a politician says something, it doesn’t mean that you (the media) have to just quote it as it is. There needs to be some form of fact-checking,” he said.

“This is what’s missing from Malaysian political discourse compared with other countries.” - FMT