The Problem with Affluenza

My sisters and I live far apart, but we have an amazonian connection. In other words, we like to order books and send them to each other through amazon, then we'll email or skype each other about what we thought of them. My sister in Ireland has a habit of sending me fiction that makes me laugh out loud or cry - if it gets that much of an emotional response from me then it's a good book in my view. One time she sent me some non-fiction that nearly made me cry for a different reason.

The name of the book was Affluenza. The book was intended to be a thesis of sorts on how more affluence creates more miserable people - the richer people are and the more they strive to be rich, the less happy they are and the higher the levels of anxiety and depression. When I first started it I thought it might be an interesting topic, but as I read on, I decided I really didn't like the book at all.

There was a major flaw in the book in my view. The guy that wrote it was supposed to be looking at different cultures and societies and do an objective investigation into the happiness levels of those in affluent societies and compare them with the less affluent. He used the word "affluenza" to show the sickness of the affluent and then he would go on to give some fabulous advice (some common sense) on how to be immune from the affluenza virus. This might have been OK it if wasn't totally obvious that the guy had already made up his mind about his research before he packed his backpack to go off around the world (by the way, a lot of his research involved talking to unfulfilled rich people and happy poor people - he gave some statistics too, but nowhere near enough). Needless to say, he was hard on the American culture and capitalism and know what? I like America.

I read about three quarters of the book before I decided I didn't want to read anymore. My husband asked me why I didn't finish it. I told him the obvious bias of the author and his total lack of objectivity just annoyed me, but I also became aware of my own bias - I didn't like the fact that the writer was being very critical and negative about the country where I have chosen to live. I then tried to analyze which of the two I found the most disturbing.

The point of this post is to highlight some things that we all should be aware of - bias in any type of research, including massage therapy research, and levels of objectivity. Did you know that there are 35 types of bias* identified in clinical research? Hopefully the methodology employed by the researchers will have control for biases as much as possible, but we should be aware that sometimes it can come into play and that an uncritical acceptance of published research can be a mistake. The other point of the post is to show that we can all have our own personal biases. We might have to look at ourselves to see if our own bias is coming into play when examining studies and sometimes going through the process of identifying personal bias and then analyzing it can be uncomfortable.

If you're thinking about buying the book, please don't bother. Really. It was rubbish (although I didn't tell my sister just how bad it was - I just hinted at it. She IS my sister after all!).

Rosemary

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*Sackett DL. Bias in analytic research