Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

196 R. Smith
between admitting that issues of quality of life are inevitably very subjective (and
by implication diverse), and the assumption that more and better statistics will bring
the answer. I set out some of the principal statements, either verbatim or very nearly
so, in tabular form. 4
Objective measures Both Subjective, diverse values
Go beyond people’s
self-reports and perceptions
Include measures of
‘functionings’ and freedoms
The challenge is to identify
gaps in available information
and to invest in statistical
capacity
Measuring the features of
quality of life requires both
subjective and objective
data
(By implication) Include
self-reports and perceptions
What really matters ...is
people’s freedom to choose
the life they value
Such choice is a value
judgement rather than a
technical exercise
The general drive towards stipulative homogeneity, however, cannot be resisted,
and it emerges with full force in para. 32, ‘While assessing quality-of-life requires a
plurality of indicators, there are strong demands to develop a single summary measure’.
This will ‘aggregate across quality-of-life dimensions’ (recommendation 9;
the sudden move to hyphenisation seems itself to confer a kind of unity). Subjective
measures of the quality of life should also be considered (para. 33): this dimension
of well-being might include ‘happiness, satisfaction, positive emotions such as joy
and pride, and negative emotions such as pain and worry’ (para. 34). It is immediately
assumed that there can be ‘quantitative measures of these subjective aspects’
(ibid.), which are then in the next sentence referred to as ‘subjective measures’(my
emphasis). No doubt these confusions reflect the need for the Commission to please
its diverse members. But it is difficult to see how a ‘single summary measure’ can
fail to do violence to the extraordinary range of goods that people in fact value, to
the many and incommensurable dimensions of human happiness and well-being.
Thus, the Stiglitz Commission, like Richard Layard, threatens to contribute to the
general levelling, the homogenising of diversity: what Jean-François Lyotard (1984)
calls a totalising ‘nostalgia of the whole and the one’.
13.4 In Search of the Bubble
The attractions of epidemiology – a branch of statistics usually understood as the
study of factors affecting the health and well-being of whole populations – are powerful.
Epidemiology is usually seen as reinstating the significance of the political
and social policy dimension of our lives, in the face of studies that over-emphasise
individual pathology (and thus solutions such as CBT). The spectacular successes
of epidemiology include the identification of the cause of cholera by John Snow in