Confusing research behind cultural debate on lonely men

Researchers at Stockholm University have previously presented figures that say that the proportion of low-income men who are childless has risen significantly since the 1970s. The figures became the starting point for an intense debate in 2018 that saw women rate men with low education and income and that an increasing number of low-income men remained childless.

At the beginning of the year, the cultural debate regained momentum when the Gothenburg Post's culture manager Björn Werner referred to the same research and wrote, among other things, that a growing group of men risk being placed outside society.

The study in question, which showed that the proportion of low-income men who are childless has risen since the 1970s, is written by Anne Boschini and Marianne Sundström, a researcher at Stockholm University. The figures were then included in an article in Research and Progress 2018.

"To put it straight, it is about poor men not becoming fathers," Marianne Sundström said in the article in Research and Progress.

The article had a major media impact and was cited, among other things, in texts in SvD, Aftonbladet and DN.

But now another researcher at the same institution says that the proportion of low-income men who are childless has not increased at all since the 1970s, but it is just the opposite: More low-income men form a family today, than 50 years ago, it is new message.

"In the 1970s, about half of the poorest men formed a family, but nowadays more than two-thirds of the group form a family," said Johanna Rickne, professor of economics, in Ekot's Saturday interview on January 11.

With that, the debate turned, and cultural journalist Anna Hellgren criticized Björn Werner in a text in the Expressen. Hellgren also gave cultural journalism a sub-rating for not basing "their contradictory statements about alleged social change on accessible science".

When the Cultural News tries to find out which of the research results are really right, and why the same institution came out with completely contradictory conclusions in the media at one year's intervals, we get no answer. Anne Boschini and Marianne Sundström do not want to comment on why their 2018 study will have the opposite result compared to the figures that Johanna Rickne now presents.

Neither does Johanna Rickne want to comment on her colleagues' study or why the 2018 figures show a completely different trend than her research. Nor does she explain how it is that research from the same institution presents two completely different truths.

She, on the other hand, tells about her own information which she obtained by using Swedish register data for all public records.

- Among the men who were among the 20 percent with the lowest income in Sweden and who turned 45 in 1970, about 45 percent were childless. In 2015, one third in the same group were childless. So childlessness among low-income men has dropped from almost half to about one-third, Johanna Rickne told Culture News.

Henrik Höjer is a science journalist at Research and Progress and the author of the article as Anne Boschini and Marianne Sundström's research, which was disseminated in 2018. He is surprised by the totally opposite information that has emerged.

- It is very uncommon to disagree with basic data. You usually discuss explanations, interpretations and theories in the research world, it is only natural, but basic data is very strange, I think, he tells Culture News.