Fundamentalists live longer...!

[dalriada]

A Sunday Story from the BBC website:

Religious denomination can be a factor in health, researchers in Northern Ireland have said.

A team at Belfast's Queen's University broke the population into six groups to track health and mortality trends.

They found that, overall, Catholics had higher death rates - with the study showing a clear link between this and deprivation. Church of Ireland people had the highest risk of dying from heart disease, researchers said. The research, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, said fundamentalists lived longest and had the lowest risk of dying from lung cancer or alcohol related diseases.

Researchers split the population into Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Ireland, Methodist, those who did not state what they were and mostly fundamentalist Christians. It said there was a reduced accidental death risk for Methodists and 'other Christians' than the other denominations

.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7223569.stm

[DrS]

Does anyone else find these kinds of reports irritating? It's not the research that gets me (necessarily) but the reporting, because the journalists (and sometimes perhaps even the researchers, as seems to be the case here) clearly have no idea of causality ... or are trying to force a causal link that simply doesn't exist.

Catholics, perhaps subject to discrimination, and possibly more likely to be living in deprived and overcrowded conditions, will understandably have more significant chance of health problems. Fundamentalists are, it seems to me, more likely to be sworn off stimulants like nicotine or "recreational" drugs or alcohol, and will therefore not be subject to their associated health risks. It's not connected with their religion directly at all, so why is there this attempt at making the connection?

[Janot]

Catholics had higher death rates

This standard of writing for a journalist is disgraceful. What does it mean? A greater percentage of Catholics actually die, or what?

[Janot]

As DrS says, the fact there is a correlation does not mean there is a causal connection. Clearly there is a correlation between religion and social status, so why attempt to imply that the religion directly affects the life expectancy?

[Fiona]

In this case I am not prepared to let the journalists take the blame for garbage in. While it may be that there is more to this "research" than is reported, the fact appears to be that the researchers investigated mortality on the basis of religion. Since they are clearly aware that the findings are mediated by such things as poverty, alcohol use, discrimination and a great many other factors, there is absolutely no reason to hypothesise that religion is either relevant or independent. This is more scientism and it is a form of woo, IMHO. Why do we fund this garbage?

[DrS]

I could not agree more.

[dalriada]

Catholics, perhaps subject to discrimination, and possibly more likely to be living in deprived and overcrowded conditions, will understandably have more significant chance of health problems. Fundamentalists are, it seems to me, more likely to be sworn off stimulants like nicotine or "recreational" drugs or alcohol, and will therefore not be subject to their associated health risks. It's not connected with their religion directly at all, so why is there this attempt at making the connection?

Because it's Northern Ireland and there is an 'Equality Agenda' . As government departments must carry out Section 75 Assessments to determine if policies have adverse impact across a range of demographic characteristics, including religion, there is potentially some mileage for researchers in suggesting that religious background needs to be looked at more carefully with regard to health policy (and with a record of publication in the area, they are precisely the researchers to be funded to do it).

The full article is available from Science Direct so I looked it up. It's an analysis of existing census data (no data collection involved, yay!) which I think is over-interpreted, in particular regarding the many assumptions made about how health behaviours and risk may relate to declared church membership. The authors do acknowledge that declaration of affiliation says little about observance or adherence but nevertheless at one point actually go as far as stating that "the past tendency to marry within the same religious group suggests the possibility of genetically determined differences"

However the biggest flaw in the study is its failure to consider the health needs of Jedi Knights.

[DrS]

Thanks for this. It sounds to me like it's over-interpreted to the point of a nice research cheque ...

[brodski]

This standard of writing for a journalist is disgraceful. What does it mean? A greater percentage of Catholics actually die, or what?

It's just annother way of saying that Catholics have higher birth rates

[vbloke]

A good phrase to keep in mind when faced with these sorts of "studies"

"Interpolate all you want, but don't you dare extrapolate!"