When conducting a study in sociology or psychology that involves collecting data from interviews or interactions with people, it has to be approved by an ethics committee.

Which means that the Stellenbosch University study,  Age- and education-related effects on cognitive functioning in colored South African women, was cleared before it was researched.

The function and efficiency of the ethics committee, in this case, is something that someone should probably look into, because the study has been widely labelled as both racist and offensive since being circulated on social media over the Easter weekend.

News24 with more:

According to the abstract, the study assessed the cognitive function and its association with age and education in a sample of 60 coloured South African women aged between 18 and 64. Their cognitive function was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and a computerised neurocognitive test, finding that they “present with low cognitive function and which is significantly influenced by education”.

60 people is not a large enough sample size to draw any definitive conclusions about an entire group of people. Drawing on this tiny sample size, the researchers came to the conclusion that “coloured women in South Africa have an increased risk of low cognitive functioning, owing to low education levels and unhealthy lifestyle behaviours”.

Here’s what Stellenbosch University had to say:

Professor Eugene Cloete, deputy vice-chancellor for research, innovation and postgraduate studies, said the institution neither condones nor evaluates the opinions reached by its scholars as participants in this academic debate.

Although the university acknowledged the importance of the “rigorous academic discussion and critical debate” following its publication, it was “concerned about the pain and anger” the article has solicited within the academic community and broader society, Cloete said.

“As an institution we are opposed to racism, including intellectual racism or attributing cognitive capacities such as intelligence in terms of race.”

Barbara Boswell, an associate professor of English at the University of Cape Town, has started a petition calling for the article to be retracted (you can add your name to that here).

“The authors ignore a large body of postcolonial and critical race theory which shows that the idea of ‘race’ is a set of articulated political relations and that racial categories are highly unstable, fluid, and provisional,” she wrote in an open letter to the editorial board of the journal which published the study.

“Instead, they uncritically use the apartheid racial designation ‘Coloured’. Their definition of communities so classified does not problematise the idea of ‘mixed race’; incorrectly suggests that these communities are a homogeneous class; conflates ‘race’ and ethnicity; and suggests what can only be read as percentages of biological inheritance by ‘race’ and ‘clan’. The latter is akin to eugenics.”

As Boswell correctly posits, both the title and the abstract infer that the results apply to all “coloured” women in South Africa:

What passes for research at Stellenbosch Univ, complete with colonial tropes about the size of our heads! When racism is embedded in your worldview, epistemology, and academic structure, this is the outcome! How do you look your “coloured” colleagues and students in the eye? pic.twitter.com/uugerYv5VI

— Barbara Boswell (@BobbiBoswell) April 18, 2019

This problematic paper is clearly bad research, fuelled by bad research practices, and cleared by an ethics committee that needs to be reviewed.

The journal and the peer reviewers who approved the work for publication should also check themselves.

[source:news24]