Too awful - happily, the source contradicts the BBC News paraphrase

I wasn't going to blog today, but when I got back this afternoon, I was browsing the BBC News and saw a new article that covered pretty much exactly the topics and ideas that we've been looking at in Quest for the past couple of weeks.

In "'I was disconnected from everyone,'" Ali Winters relates the personal stories of young women from different cultures to support the research findings that suicide, now the (third? - Winters appears to make the two contradictory statements) most common cause of death for women aged 10 to 19, is closely associated with depression and is even higher in cultures where there remains a stigma attached to having psychological disorders and also in cultures where social norms and economic problems are more likely to put women and youth from minority groups at greater risk of killing themselves (2015).

So much for Winters' news story. But as I was reading, I realised that it was even more relevant to what we talked about in class this morning: the use of sources. As I read, I was thinking that the figures Winters cited from her sources, the generally respected World Health Organization and excellent academic journals, were depressing. Then they became incredible. When I say "incredible," I mean literally unbelievable. I was horrified to hear that "one in five girls in the country aged between 16 and 17 were suffering from a major depressive disorder, one in six had self-harmed and one in 20 had attempted suicide" (Winters, 2015), but the source for these figures was self-reporting on a survey, so we might reasonably suspect that 20% of Australian girls do not in fact attempt suicide as reported. People's self-reporting of their motives and behaviours on surveys is not a reliable way to find out either what they do or what actually motivates them: behavioural economists and I suspect Facebook are much better at getting to the truth of such matters. 5% of young women in my country might attempt suicide, but I would want to see some more solid evidence before I believed this claim. It's just too high.

If it was hard to believe the numbers of suicidal young Aussie women that Winters reported, her numbers for young men and women in India were completely ridiculous. Winters writes that "A total of 60% of women and 40% of men between the age of 15 and 29 commit or attempt suicide, according to a 2012 study published in The Lancet" (2015). I decided to quote her here because you need to see that she really did say that - it's not a wrong paraphrase by me.

At this point I was starting to have serious doubts about Winters' ability to read and write English, or to think critically - surely she can't believe what she wrote?  I read and reread the paragraph she had written very carefully in case I had some how misunderstood, but it's very clear. Winters apparently thinks that India is littered with the bodies of dead youth.

The Lancet is one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, so the next thing I did was check Winters' source. As the abstract for the article very clearly says, the number of suicides in India is indeed high: a total of 3% of deaths in India for those over age 15 are due to suicide, giving a number of 26.3 per 100,000 people for men and 17.5 for women (Patel et al. 2012). This is nowhere near the amazing figures of 60% and 40% that Winters writes. Her mistake, I think, is to have been confused by two other statistics in the Lancet article: 40% of suicide deaths (not all deaths, and certainly not all people) for men and 56% of deaths by suicide in women occur between the ages of 15 and 29 years. These figures and sound very believable, and I trust The Lancet, which is a rigorously peer reviewed academic journal.

It was, I thought, such a timely lesson on the importance of the careful use of sources and the need to check everything, especially when it is surprising, that I decided to blog it. Winters' mistake both in reading her source and then failing to understand it before she paraphrased is amazing: I had to go back and read her sentence several times to make sure it really did say what I thought it said. It does. it still does. I'm sure you will all do much better paraphrasing Kasschau this evening.

But Winters' errors are so obvious I wonder how they could have passed the BBC News sub-editors before going on line. Surely anyone who read it must have reacted the same way I did? Maybe they will correct the mistakes. The New York Times often revises articles to correct small mistakes, which are certainly easy to make, as you will have noticed in my writing. Naturally, when a correction is made, quality publications note when and what was revised. In case they do correct it, I made a screen shot of the BBC story at around 2:00 PM as evidence for my quotations above. My quotation is from the second last paragraph in the screen shot.

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Reference

Patel, V., Ramasundarahettige, C., Vijayakumar, L., Thakur, J. S., Gajalakshmi, V., Gururaj, G., ... Jha, P. (2012). Suicide mortality in India: a nationally representative survey [Abstract]. The Lancet, 379(9834), 2343-2351. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60606-0 (This reference citation follows the format on the OWL at Purdue website we looked at before. It's an online journal articles with a DOI.)

Winters, A. (2015, November 30). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34944454