Researchers on corporal punishment face organized institutional resistance
Evidence
Second: each scientist worked in the face of resistance. The pattern is worth naming explicitly because it is not accidental. Research on corporal punishment is politically contested research. The findings challenge a practice that is deeply embedded in cultural, religious, and personal identity for large numbers of people. Researchers who produce findings that challenge the practice face organized institutional resistance — from parent advocates, from religious organizations, from political constituencies, from other researchers who have invested careers in more favorable interpretations of the evidence. The resistance that Straus, Gershoff, Felitti, and the others encountered was not a measurement problem. It was a social fact about what it means to do science in a politically charged domain. Felitti was dismissed at Atlanta. Gershoff was attacked for twelve years by methodologically skilled critics. Teicher worked for a decade before the field recognized the importance of his direction. Gunnar’s validation work was invisible. Straus was accused of politicizing family research. Each one kept going. The persistence, collectively, is a fact about the science as much as the findings are. The findings accumulated because the scientists did not stop. — , The Rod and the Child, 9807
Related
- Corporal punishment is concentrated on society’s least powerful members (similarity 0.80)
- Institutional resistance delayed publication of a correct clinical observation by thirteen years. (similarity 0.80)
- Child beating is enabled by structural conditions, not just individual choices (similarity 0.79)
- Institutional structures, not ideology, determined severity of corporal practice (similarity 0.79)