Data scientists often engage in a process called data scrubbing, or ” cleaning” the data. It’s not nefarious, it is just the way to ensure that the data they are using is the most reliable and analyzable data available. Although the decisions on data scrubbing are based upon researchers’ ideas of what kind of data is most reliable, it is necessary for coherent analysis.
Data scrubbing involves removing unreliable or complicating data.
One other thing that happens, especially in population level alcohol studies using epidemiological data is something I call culture scrubbing. The process of lifting the activity of drinking from its actual cultural context.
Culture scrubbing is normally unintentional, but extremely important and prevalent in alcohol studies. It allows certain types of drinking to be compared, but also allows broader datasets to be analyzed. According to alcohol researchers, it is necessary for clean and reliable conclusions. To those of us who study drinking, not just drink, it renders much of those conclusions meaningless, or at least highly suspect.
To illustrate this, here are some simple questions. When you go for a drink, do you count the grams of alcohol in your beverage? No? Ok, well do you count your drinks per week or drinks per day? Do you drink regularly the same amount each week, or are there times of the year when you might drink more or less? Do you consume different types of alcoholic drinks at different times of the year, or week?
These are all examples of cultural idiosyncrasies of drinking that disappear in much alcohol research. And they are really important. not just because some grouchy contrarian like me will say “but you’re lifting drinking from lived experience” (which I say a lot and yes I am grouchy) but because, if the point is to give meaningful advice about an individual’s drinking, you need to recognize that different people drink differently at different times and in different places.
So alcohol research does a few key things to culture scrub:
- Calculates alcohol as grams of ethanol rather than drinks
- Eliminates considerations of different types of beverage(wine, beer, spirits) arguing that it’s all ethanol anyway and if we asked people, say, about the amount of wine they drank, that might not capture the other substances so the data will be meaningless
- Talk about drinking patterns as some kind of regular behaviour: drinks per day, drinks per week, not recognizing that people drink differently across the seasons
- Reduce or eliminate discussion of age or any other demographics except for biological sex
- Do not consider location where people are drinking
- Do not consider why people might drink, or other patterns rooted in culture.
Let’s take an example. When I was in my early 20s, I could really put it away. And sometimes I did. And then sometimes I did not.
Sometimes it was a bunch of beer on Friday. One time I went head to head with a bottle of tequila and a woman who was smaller than me, but kicked my ass metaphorically despite the lower body mass. (She was from the Canadian maritime provinces, which may explain a lot).
If I ever tried to drink in one session now (at 58) the amount I did when I was 25, I’d at best just pass out, but definitely make a call on the porcelain telephone.
So age matters.
Then there are patterns of the year. At holidays people might drink more, and different seasons are conducive to different drinking patterns and different types of drinks. Long slow drinking bouts on a patio may mean vastly exceeding recommended limits, but the slow part is important: your liver is doing the work it’s evolved to do. A Friday night session with work colleagues (the ones you like, not with that guy–you know who I’m talking about) may involve different types of drinking–a round of shots? Maybe (even at 58).
My local brewpub used to gift me a shot of bourbon on my birthday. I think it was an excuse for the bartender to join me in a shot…Ah the good old days.
My point is this: consuming alcohol is deeply embedded in our culture. And the process of lifting it out of cultural uniqueness, under the excuse of more adequately analyzable data, actually undermines the entire process of providing meaningful advice to people.
At the least the advice will be misunderstood, at the worst such advice will be dismissed as more paternalistic finger wagging. Neither is ideal.
It is time to bring culture back into the discussion.
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