'SHARED RESIDENCE NOT A 'MAGIC SOLUTION' - Politically correct research funded by a politically correct government?

From a press release from Leeds University, England, Shared residency not a 'magic solution'

Children who split their time equally between their parents’ houses after divorce or separation may find this arrangement increasingly difficult as they get older, according to new research from the University of Leeds.

These findings from the ESRC Enduring Families project come as Fathers 4 Justice – the group calling for mandatory shared residency – descend upon Trafalgar Square to kick-off their ‘uprising’ campaign, and just as the Australian Government consider implementing automatic 50/50 residence on divorce.

In their forthcoming article, the research team reveal that shared residence caused unhappiness for some children. Difficulties emerge if arrangements are too rigid and if parents are inattentive to the problems their children face in living their lives across two homes. Some children reported feeling trapped. Others felt unsettled in one of their homes. Some of the teenagers interviewed said they were looking forward to leaving home so they could stop packing their bags every week...

You can Download the full article for publication in Family Law December 2003 (MS Word 97 format). (Right click and choose "Save As..") There are a few quotes here. There are the five interviews with children and former children of shared residences.

It was also very important for children to feel that both houses were ‘home’ and they could enjoy good and supportive relationships with both parents. The quote from Emma, aged 14, below captures all of these elements:
Interviewer: So it’s like a whole week with each parent?
Emma: Yeah but I still see, if I’m at my dad’s, ‘cos my dad works late till about five or something, I’ll go to my mum’s after school like to just say hi and drop in and stuff for a while and then I’ll go to my dad’s. But when I’m at my mum’s, if it’s like a birthday during the week at anybody’s house, then I’ll just go there and just spend a while there. …

Leonie (aged 16): The actual 4 days at mum’s and 3 days at dad’s haven’t changed. [But] it’s got worse over the past year or so. … Like I was supposed to be stopping at mum’s on Friday night but the way I saw it, Friday night was the one night that neither person kind of owned, ‘cos they own our days (laughing). She’ll say “Friday night’s my day”, which pretty much says, “I own Friday”. So last Friday I slept at dad’s ‘cos I’d been seeing friends. The only way that I could get her to let me stop at dad’s was to say that dad was not going to be in.

Sophie (15): It was only just at the beginning of this year actually [that I stopped going to my dad’s so frequently]. I was just feeling a bit ... I don’t know, there wasn’t much for me to do and I thought I would have more to do here and because I don’t have a computer and I use that for my work and things. And err, my dad was usually doing something else, somewhere else and I was just usually just sitting around doing, you know watching telly or something … Often it was that I was downstairs and he was upstairs doing whatever he was doing. … I was actually quite depressed and it was getting to me a bit. …I don’t know I just didn’t feel like I was, well, not welcome to come in and invade his space and stuff.

Angela (aged 20): Well (long pause)….My Dad, my Dad is a very dominant and strong personality. … My Dad is quite jealous so he gets upset if he doesn’t have equal or more … more than equal of the time spent with my mother …He is a fiercely kind of, I don’t know, involved father….

Ellie (aged 20): It was the nicest thing. Like for once I had everything in one room like all my clothes in one room. I was settled for the first time in like ten years, I actually felt settled. I actually felt like I was just settled do you know what I mean? ...Not living out of a bag.

You may notice there is not a single interview with a boy or young man about shared residency. Maybe they might have said something about mother being insensitive to their needs or maybe they were just shy or maybe the interviewers didn't value their opinions. You'll never know from this study. Out of only 30 children, 12 boys, 18 girls they quote only 5 interviews, all girls, no boys, and 1 positive to 4 negative. Beyond that we know nothing about what the other children said, all 12 boys and the other 13 girls. Essentially what the report amounts to is that the 4 girls with negative appraisals are wrapped around with a call for caution about shared residence.

Isn't it strange that this comes out of the woodwork, explicitly mentioning Fathers 4 Justice, at a time like this. No previous fathers group seems to have had research, such as it is, to specifically discuss (and dismiss) their ideas. Could be they're getting worried. One might wonder who's doing this research and why.

First of all, this report is going into "Family Law" , a journal by Jordan Publishing apparently for family law practitioners. If you go there you'll find a special offer for "Family Court Practice 2004"

Family Court Practice 2004
Editor-in-Chief: The Hon Mrs Justice Bracewell
General Editor: District Judge Anthony Cleary
Consulting Editor: The Hon Mrs Justice Black

"for day-to-day use in the courts the red-bound Family Court Practice is unrivalled"
Butterworths Litigation Journal

The Family Court Practice is the acknowledged authority on practice and procedure in family courts and is relied upon every day by the judiciary, barristers, solicitors and justices' clerks.

Covering the entire range of family business in every level of court, in just one volume it contains fully and expertly annotated statutes and rules together with scores of unique step-by-step procedural guides, which direct the user effortlessly to the relevant rules and annotation.

A snip at £175 (about $320), a must for all family court judges, and there's me thinking they were using "the force". I'll bet there are no father groups with articles in that book. Any takers?

Now were did the research come from? From the original press release it comes from CAVA which is short for "Care, Values and the Future of Welfare" (Maybe "Cava" is a rap thing, you know the first syllables of the first 2 words). Under "About Cava" we find

Based at the University of Leeds, the ESRC Group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (CAVA) was established in 1999 to deliver a five-year research programme on changes in parenting and partnering and the implications of these for future social policies.

At the heart of CAVA's research programme is an investigation into the values that people attach to their parenting and partnering activities. We are interested in 'what matters' to people in these relationships, especially as they undergo change. To this end, CAVA has been conducting six qualitative research projects on aspects of social change in care, relationships and family life. The research team brings together experts from social policy, sociology, geography, psychology, and socio-legal studies.

CAVA's research portfolio has continued to expand over recent years. As well as research funding from the ESRC, CAVA's Research Group also carries out research funded by other bodies, notably the European Commission, the Nuffield Foundation and the Department of Constitutional Affairs (formerly the Lord Chancellor's Department).

Note the DCA connection. Two of the authors of the report, Carol Smart and Bren Neale, also wrote a book Family Fragments? described like this

The past decade has seen the emergence of an orthodoxy which depicts the family as being in moral decline and 'blames' parents for the harms of divorce. Family Fragments? takes issue with this political vision and with the idea that divorce is inevitably a harmful process. Although some households are fragmenting, the authors argue that moral commitments are not simply sundered. Instead they put forward a different perspective on divorce as well as formulating principles of policy based on an ethic of care.

But where is all this coming from? If you look at Specific Links on the CAVA site you find a lot of government links and research centres links. Several of the research links are to other research centres in Leeds, for example Carol Smart is deputy director of CAVA, but also director of the Centre for Research on Family, Kinship and Childhood also at Leeds (I wonder if she gets a full salary for both jobs?). Now all of these seem to have all or most of their funding from ESRC - Economic and Social Research Council, which lists it mission as

to promote and support, by any means, high quality basic, strategic and applied research and related postgraduate training in the social sciences

to advance knowledge and provide trained social scientists who meet the needs of users and beneficiaries, thereby contributing to the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom, the effectiveness of public services and policy, and the quality of life

to provide advice on, and disseminate knowledge and promote public understanding of the social sciences.

(If there's one thing these PC types have got plenty of it's words. Meaning on the other hand can be hard to determine). Basically they want to promote and advance social sciences for the benefit of us poor slobs who might mistakenly think it's a load of Turner Prizes. And where do they get their funding from? After some digging on the ESRC site we find Staff Handbook - About the ESRC

ESRC spends approximately £84 million annually, of which the majority is received as grant-in-aid from the Office of Science and Technology (OST) Science Vote. It receives approximately £8 million in income from other government departments and contributions from other bodies. Its financial and staffing procedures and arrangements are subject to approval by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Minister for the Civil Service. Its financial arrangements are subject to government accounting procedures, and also governed by its Financial Memorandum and the Resource Management Agreement for Government Research Councils. Staff conditions of service and employment are largely analogous to those in the Civil Service, but with areas subject to ESRC delegation and determination.

ESRC's budget is largely spent on: research grants to universities, and colleges in the higher education sector (HEIs) and independent research institutes; over 20 Research Centres and 25 Research Programmes which are also based in and part of HEIs supported by contractual grant; and the support of postgraduate students through the payment of fees and maintenance support grants. Approximately £56 million is spent on research, £23 million on postgraduate training, just over £4 million on administration, and just over £0.6 million on information and research evaluation activities.

ESRC employs approximately one hundred staff based at Polaris House, Swindon which is shared with four other government research councils. Accommodation and buildings and a number of joint services are primarily administered by a number of inter Research Council Joint Services.

So there you have it. In some of the research centres at Leeds there are references to feminism, ethnic groups and other politically correct topics. Clearly the message from this CAVA study is that divorce is not a bad thing, but we're not sure about this shared residence. Under the guise of doing independent scientific research, we find groups researching only those things that are politically correct and happen to suit a politically correct government. The Government fund ESRC which funds CAVA which comes out with reports for the Government, which surprise, surprise, don't tell the Government they've got it worng, that they might have messed up the family courts, but just happen to retrospectively confirm the Government's position. CAVA's position is same as the research bodies that used to be funded by the tobacco industry, for the same basic reason.

Comments

[Walter Schneider]

Going by how the research is being interpreted in the article you posted, "...shared residence caused unhappiness for some children", I suspected that what the research found is that equally shared residence actually works extremely well, that it makes the vast majority of children very happy and only "caused unhappiness for some children."

That makes sense to me. It also makes sense that the protagonists of families and equally shared parenting would state the opposite of what research may show, by generalizing from a few exceptions in the sample that got studied.

The important thing to find out is what the respective proportions of satisfied versus unsatisfied children were that the research found.

It is even more important to determine whether the study sample was randomly selected. If that is not the case, then absolutely no valid extrapolations to anything at all can be made, which is what is true of all advocacy research.

More importantly yet, how do the children raised in shared-parenting arrangements compare to children raised in intact families headed by two married, biological parents (one of each sex)? Was a control group of such children used in the study?

Isn't it odd that the article says nothing at all about those considerations that are standard in objective and credible research? If the research did not address those considerations, then it is nothing more than meaningless advocacy research.

I looked at "Drifting towards Shared Residence?"

This is what I found:

1.) The "research is based on findings from two studies.

2.) It is not stated how large the study samples were in each of the studies.

3.) It is not stated whether an analysis was done of the combined study sample of 117 interviews.

4.) Thirty percent (35 interviews) of the 117 interviews involved children that were raised in shared residency (some were close to 60/40, others 50/50 residency splits).

5.) To ask children about "the arrangements their parents had made over residence and contact and how they felt about spending time with both parents, whether they wanted different arrangements, and what things made their lives easier and what made things worse", is hardly an objective evaluations of things. For one thing, "easier" and "worse" are relative terms, and no standard for comparison is offered. That makes the findings of the "study" purely subjective and dimensionless.

6.) "In 2001 we re-contacted 60 of the children who had been part of our original study, 30 of whom had been in shared residence arrangements." Nothing is said whether these children were selected randomly. If that was not done, no valid extrapolations to the rest of the population can be made. Moreover to examine the views of children of how well they liked something is not an objective evaluation of the reality that those children were or are in. By what measuring standards can those children's views be considered to be objective or relative to what?

7.) The report contains an accurate assessment by the authors of what they think their findings are worth: "...the longer term impact and effectiveness of these arrangements is often unknown." There you've got it. Something that is unknown can't be measured or evaluated by any means at all.

8.) The statement, "We also know relatively little about the effectiveness of arrangements that have been privately agreed," is incontrovertible evidence that what the authors studied was not a random sample. A random sample of sufficient size would have included a number of children raised in intact families by two married parents, and children raised in any other known type of parenting arrangements. The random sampling would have to be expanded until cases of all known parenting arrangement are included. Only then would it be possible to make valid comparisons of performance of all arrangements in relative terms.
However, if a valid, absolute performance standard were to exist (it doesn't), then it would be permissible to evaluate a single parenting-type group against that standard. Neither of those necessary comparisons, in terms of absolute or relative quality of performance, was made.

9.) The report provide no indication that a standard questionnaire was used in the interviews.

It is not necessary to read more than that of the study report. Whatever comes after that is garbage. It would be a waste of time to read more; and to read it would be of use only to propagandists. However, I did that, just in case my conclusions should wrong and concrete facts in absolute terms would be included in the report. I found no such thing. I found more subjective evaluations in general terms, unsupported by data, but bolstered by some anecdotal non-quantifiable evidence.

That is not science. It is quackery. No doubt, the authors were paid well for that, but however much it was, it is a waste of taxpayers' money. At the very least the authors should have normalized their findings over all types of parenting arrangements and in terms of the subjective perceptions that the children they interviewed had of both of their parents.

At least the authors have the grace to state: "Our study was not designed to determine whether one kind of post-divorce residence arrangement was better than another." However, they did not have the honesty to select examples of children being unhappy with their mothers. The examples of quoted excerpts they selected castigate fathers. That leaves me with the impression that their "study" was designed to manufacture or select information that could be of use to intensify the vilification and slandering of fathers.

The government officials that commissioned and paid for the "study" should be taken to task. They received no perceptible value for the money they paid.