Which is more important: the data or the narrative?
This article is part of Big Squirrel’s “Small Bites” series – short, easily digestible musings from our team, designed to get you thinking.
Jen Lumanlan dives in to the alarming hockey stick graphs in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Despite wide cultural acceptance of Haidt’s narrative, Lumanlan argues that many apparent spikes in youth depression and suicide may not coincide with social media at all, but relate instead to expanded diagnostic criteria shifting medical codes and documentation, and greater access to care. Within the podcast, Lumanlan dissects several studies cited in The Anxious Generation that don’t quite provide the same emphatic conclusion. She even quotes Dr. Christopher Ferguson, professor of psychology at Stetson University, who reviewed Haidt’s data and said he would “fail a student” for interpreting it the way Haidt does–yikes.
Listen to the podcast here: Is there really a Mental Health Crisis in the U.S.?
Why does this matter now?
Like everything worth contemplating, this is about what it’s about– how we can rewrite a mental health crisis– and it’s also not. For big-picture thinkers (like you!), it’s about more than that. This is about cultural narratives that define problems and the solutions that, with the best intentions, it’s possible to design interventions based on flawed data interpretation or falsely attributed cause. The risk is misdiagnosing the problem and deploying solutions that do more harm than good or even miss the mark entirely.
What lies at the intersection of data and narrative?
Which is more important– the data or the story that shapes the data? No doubt Haidt’s work has fueled an important movement around the way we think about social media and mental well-being, despite being dissected by critics. How do we know our data is guiding us in the right direction? How do we bring data and storytelling together to move beyond measurement into meaning?