Woozles: Their Role in Custody Law Reform, Parenting Plans, and Family Court
Linda Nielsen (2014)
Winnie the Pooh went for a walk with his friends in the Hundred-Meter-Forest. They got lost and walked in circles. When they saw their own tracks, they thought it must be traces of woozles. In the social sciences, we use the term for self-generated and questionably documented research findings. We also call it "academic rumours". Such woozles are more common in research than we like to admit: Spinach is very rich in iron; overweight and obesity are dangerous to health; cholesterol-rich foods lead to heart disease; clinical examination of strep throat is useless. Unfortunately, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has been involved in producing such woozles. In this article, Linda Nielsen shows how parts of the research community have managed to create an "academic rumour" that shared custody is irrelevant and even worse: can be dangerous for the youngest children.
The purpose of this article is not to advocate for any particular parenting plan or to present the research on shared parenting custody controversies. Rather it is to describe the way in which social science data can be used to steer policymakers, family court personnel, and parents off course in regard to parenting plans and custody law reform—and to illustrate this process with a recent study that has garnered international attention in regard to parenting plans for infants and other children 4-years-old and younger.
Nearly 30 years ago, Richard Gelles (1980) popularized the concept of the “woozle effect.” A sociologist whose area of expertise was the research on domestic violence, Gelles (1980) was concerned about how this research was frequently misrepresented and misused by advocacy groups for their own political purposes. In particular, he was troubled because only those studies that supported a particular advocacy position—many of which were seriously flawed—were being presented as “the” research evidence, while those studies refuting the position were being ignored. As a consequence, many false beliefs about domestic violence were perpetuated— beliefs Gelles (1980) referred to as woozles.
Put differently, a woozle is a definitive statement based on data that are very limited, flawed, ambiguous, or erroneous. Through a number of different “woozling” techniques, these flawed, scanty, or inaccurate data become magnified and widely disseminated, overshadowing data that would challenge it. Certain aspects of the woozle might be partially true in that some findings in a few studies can be interpreted in ways that lend some support to portions of the woozle. That is, there might be a small grain of truth buried in a bushel of untruths - which is one reason why woozles are so hard to challenge.
How Are Woozles Born and Raised?
Before illustrating how one particular woozle has arisen in regard to child custody, we have to be able to recognize the many ways in which woozling occurs. How do studies become part of a woozle? How do data from a study get misrepresented into something that barely resembles the researchers’ original findings? As we will see, no one person or no one event can be held accountable for creating or for promoting a woozle. The process involves a constellation of factors, interacting with one another in ways that often are unpredictable and unforeseen. As described below, academicians have expanded on Gelles (1980) original ideas about how woozles are created—describing numerous ways in which data become distorted into woozles. Many are beyond the control of the authors of the original study, whereas others clearly involve their intentional or unintentional participation.
The paper illustrates the mechanisms as:
Evidence by citation: Some papers that fit with popular political opinions are emphasised and cited and cross-cited in perpetuate manners.
Misrepresenting other researchers’ findings: Academics can read and interpret data with prejudice and the findings become misrepresented and studies are cited in support of positions that are directly opposite to their conclusions. Such misrepresentations give rise to what is often called «scholarly rumours».
Cherry picking: Writers or speakers may choose to report only a few studies or only some of the findings from a particular study – a bias referred to as “cherry picking”. Another version of cherry picking is the “white hat bias” – a phrase coined by public health researchers Cope and Allison to describe the bias in reporting the data on soft drinks and obesity. As with the good guys wearing the white hats in the cowboy movies, well intentioned authors can be biased in reporting the research because they are trying to achieve a “righteous end.”
Confirmation bias: A woozle also is more likely to arise and to spread when it confirms beliefs that people already hold—an effect known as “confirmation bias”. We are overly critical and dismissive of data that contradict our existing beliefs and are too willing to accept data that confirm them.
Researchers’ Contributions to Woozling Their Data
Researchers themselves can also inadvertently - or in some cases intentionall - contribute to the woozling of their data. For example, when presenting their findings, researchers might not report the data that contradicted their hypothesis. Or the researchers might exaggerate the significance of their data, present their findings in ways that are misleading, put disproportionate emphasis on some of their findings while ignoring others, or make policy recommendations that over reach their findings.
Characteristics of Woozles
To summarize, many scholars in the social sciences and in other disciplines have written extensively about the ways in which data can become distorted into woozles. Among the most common processes that have been discussed by these scholars are the following:
• In articles and in seminars a few studies are cherry-picked to support one position.
• Two or three studies are repeatedly cited and discussed as “the research” on a topic.
• Reviews of the research, especially those making policy recommendations, are based primarily on the same few studies, ignoring the bulk of the research.
• The data are often presented in dramatic ways with anecdotal stories, case studies, or emotionally laden pictures and graphics.
• The significance of the findings are overstated while the limitations are understated.
• Data from small or nonrepresentative samples are generalized to the general population.
• Only one theoretical perspective is used to frame the question and interpret the data.
• The data are based on measures with no established reliability or validity.
• Media reports, synopses, abstracts, or press releases overstate or misrepresent the actual data in the study.
• Data that are not statistically significant or that are contradictory and ambiguous are reported as important.
• The study’s conclusions have an inherent appeal because they confirm widely held beliefs.
• Findings that do not support the researchers’ hypothesis are dismissed or minimized.
• Definitive statements are made based on very limited or ambiguous data.
• The authors promote their own study as a basis for a particular position without putting their data in the context of the larger body of evidence.
• Studies are presented together as if they reached the same conclusion, when in fact they did not.
• The authors of a study seem reluctant to acknowledge any of the weaknesses pointed out by other scholars.
Woozles Versus Data: How to Convince Winnie There Is No Woozle
In regard to the current debates over custody law reform and parenting plans, the woozle we are going to examine is this: Infants and children 4 years and younger who spend overnight time in their fathers’ care are more irritable, more severely distressed and insecure in their elationships with their mothers, more poorly behaved with their peers, more stressed and thus more likely to wheeze, more easily distracted (less persistent), and more likely to have trouble regulating their emotions. In short, overnighting has a deleterious impact on infants and other children under the age of 4 years.
To determine whether this statement is a woozle and, if it is, to challenge it, we have to know the results of the other studies that have gathered data about children under the age of 5 years whose parenting plans involved overnighting. We also need a description of the samples to know which findings are applicable to the general population of divorced parents and which are not. There are currently 31 studies that have compared the outcomes of children who live in shared parenting families (30%–50% of the time) to children who live with their mother and spend varying amounts of overnight time with their father.
A brief summary shows how little support these nine studies lend to the woozle that spending overnight time in their fathers’ care has a deleterious impact on infants and toddlers. The studies are presented in three distinct groups: all formerly married parents, largely formerly married parents, and rarely formerly married. There are likely to be significant differences between these three groups in terms of socioeconomic variables, age, ethnicity, longevity of their relationship, and factors such as incarceration, poverty, and parenting skills that are generally associated with poor outcomes for children. For these reasons, overlooking or minimizing these differences in the research studies can contribute to inappropriate custody decisions and to misguided recommendations regarding custody law reform. Data from studies with high numbers of never married parents, especially when many of them were not even living together when their child was born, should not be applied to formerly married parents who were raising their child together before their separation.
Three of the eight studies only included parents who had formerly been married, meaning these data are the most applicable to divorced parents. The first study compared 58 children who lived with their mother and 35 who lived at least 35% time with their father, with half of them being 4-years-old or younger. One to 2 years after their parents’ separation, there were no differences in social or behavior adjustment between the two groups. The frequent overnighters, however, had better relationships with their fathers and were better adjusted emotionally.
The second study, the Stanford Custody Project, followed children from 1,100 divorced families in California over a period of 4 years (Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992). What made this study so unique for its time was that the children in 150 of these families were overnighting 30% to 50% time with their fathers. In these families, 125 of the children were infants or preschoolers younger than 5 years. At the end of 4 years, the frequently overnighting children were better off than the others on all of the standardized measures of their academic, emotional, physical, and behavioral well-being. Three years after the parents’ divorce, only 1.6% of the frequent overnighters’ fathers were seeing less of their children compared to 56% of the other fathers.
The third study assessed children from nearly 600 shared parenting and 600 primary care families in Wisconsin. Roughly 40% of the children were under the age of 5 years. Three years after their parents’ divorce, the frequently overnighting (35%–50% time) children had better relationships with their fathers, were happier and less depressed, and had fewer health problems than the less frequently overnighting children. There were no differences on measures of emotional health. Moreover, 82% of the frequent overnighters’ fathers were spending just as much time with their children as they had 3 years earlier, in contrast to only 55% of the other fathers.
In sum, the woozle finds little, if any, support in seven of these eight studies. It is also important to note that three of the eight studies (McIntosh et al., 2010; Solomon & George, 1999; Tornello et al., 2013) were predicated on assumptions about mother–infant attachment that many contemporary attachment researchers and recent empirical studies do not support. First, these three studies assume that infants form one “primary” attachment to only one of their parents; second, that the quality (security) of this one relationship largely determines infants’ abilities to regulate their emotions; third, that this attachment takes precedent over the father–infant bond especially in the first year of the infant’s life; and fourth, that overnight time away from the mother, unlike daytime separation, is particularly stressful and undermines the security of their attachment. For these reasons, these three studies assumed that infant–mother attachment should be a primary measure of infants’ well-being and the central focus of parenting plans. In fact, however, many researchers do not agree with these assumptions about attachment largely because they are not consistent with recent empirical data (Cashmore & Parkinson, 2011; Garber, 2012; Hynan, 2012; Lamb, 2012a; Ludolph, 2012; Ludolph & Dale, 2012; Warshak, 2012).
The woozle is further undermined by the consensus of a large group of social scientists: “No sufficient evidence exists to support postponing the introduction of regular and frequent involvement, including overnights, of both parents with their babies and toddlers. The theoretical and practical considerations favoring overnights for most young children are more compelling than concerns that overnights might jeopardize children’s development”.
The paper with references can be accessed here: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a4546b84d910952d986f06d873eed45ee7833a10