SEX. Everyone has an interest in that, right? I mean, if it weren’t for sex, none of us would be here — test tube babies excepted.
So it’s no surprise that a ranking of colleges and universities according to their sexual health would appear in college newspapers all across the country, including The Cavalier Daily. And it’s not terribly surprising that another survey declaring that college students like Wi-Fi even more than they like beer would get attention.
Not surprising, but a little disappointing.
Newsrooms are constantly deluged with press releases touting wondrous products, miraculous cures and sagacious insight. Not all of it is all it’s advertised to be. Journalists need to separate information from advertising; news from propaganda.
When it comes to surveys, studies and rankings, among the first questions that ought to be asked are these: Who conducted the research? Who paid for the research? What interest, beyond a selfless search for truth and knowledge, do they have in the subject?
The sexual health survey was underwritten by Trojan, the folks who sell condoms. The Wi-Fi survey came from the Wi-Fi Alliance, described in The Cavalier Daily story as “a global non-profit organization representing the wireless Internet industry.”
The sponsors’ obvious interest in the outcome ought to raise some questions. But even if they didn’t, anyone reporting on studies and polls should gain a clear understanding of the methodology used, and they should share that knowledge with their readers.
According to The Cavalier Daily, Wakefield Research, the company that conducted the Wi-Fi study, “interviewed 501 students in September from a variety of schools.” My majors were English and history, so I’m not an expert in polling, but I’m suspicious about the ability of such a small and vaguely defined sampling to speak for all university students. There’s no mention of a margin of error in the story, so it’s hard to make any judgment beyond my initial skepticism. But I have a lot of skepticism, and the story doesn’t do much to alleviate that.
I did a little research of my own about the sexual health study. First I read some other college newspapers’ reports on the rankings. I learned that Harvard was 15 places lower this year than last. Dartmouth fell 44 places. The University of Wisconsin fell from 15th to 35th. Cornell went from 63rd to third. Stanford rose from 41st to first. I couldn’t find anything that happened on those campuses that explained such wild swings among the 139 schools on the list.
But this is only the third time this ranking has been done, and there was a major change in the data collected. Sperling’s BestPlaces, the company that did the ranking, added a survey of students this year. According to The Cavalier Daily, 9,000 students responded to a survey. For a moment, I thought that meant 9,000 University of Virginia students had responded. But that was nationwide. There were 103 responses from the University. The survey was a Facebook invitation to answer some questions and get a chance to win a Wii. Not a particularly scientific way to select participants. But that was only part of the process.
According to Bert Sperling, his company looked at Web sites to see what information they could find about universities’ sexual health services. The rankers also sent surveys to the college health centers. About a third of them responded, Sperling said.
Saying that every survey is going to have drawbacks, Sperling made it clear that his company’s rankings weren’t intended to be the definitive word on this issue.
“I don’t think it’s gospel,” Sperling said. “I think it’s a good indicator. Hopefully it will spur some discussion and further thinking about sexual health and how that information gets to the students.”
Maybe it’s a good indicator. Maybe not. But there wasn’t much allowance for ambiguity in the coverage Trojan got in the campus newspapers I (unscientifically) sampled. This isn’t a shortcoming peculiar to student newspapers. The professional press is often guilty of the same thing in its reporting of polls, surveys and scientific reports. Context and background and important, and their absence keeps readers from making informed decisions about what they’re reading.
Attentive readers may have gleaned one great truth about rankings from The Cavalier Daily two weeks ago, however.
When the Trojan survey ranked the University behind Virginia Tech, James Turner, executive director of student health, was quick to explain what was wrong with the rankings. When the Princeton Review declared, for the second year in a row, that Darden professors are the best business school professors in the country, Dean Robert Bruner and others talked about how perceptive the reviewers must have been.
Tim Thornton is the Cavalier Daily ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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