Two false positives do not make a right: Setting the bar of social enterprise research even higher through avoiding the straw man fallacy

TY - JOUR

T1 - Two false positives do not make a right

T2 - Setting the bar of social enterprise research even higher through avoiding the straw man fallacy

AU - Roy, Michael J.

AU - Macaulay, Bobby

AU - Donaldson, Cam

AU - Teasdale, Simon

AU - Baker, Rachel

AU - Kerr, Susan

AU - Mazzei, Micaela

N1 - Funding Information: This study was supported with the financial assistance of the Medical Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council , ref: MR/L0032827/1 for a project entitled Developing Methods to evidence ‘social enterprise as a public health intervention’ . Funding Information: But recognising that a case could “potentially start to build” is not the same as making a case (improbable or otherwise) for health policy to support social enterprises as an alternative to (say) psychiatric treatment, which the author invokes. In order to consider the ‘case’ that is building, one needs to look beyond the scope of the two papers singled out by the author. Our initial case for considering the work of organisations that exist to address social vulnerabilities within communities, such as social enterprises, on ‘upstream’ factors in the social environment that we know favour or harm health ( Dahlgren and Whitehead, 1991 ; Wilkinson and Marmot, 2003 ) was initially set out in our article in Journal of Public Health Policy ( Roy et al., 2013 ). It was then developed further while reporting on the results of our systematic review ( Roy et al., 2014 ), which is usually a major first step taken by public health researchers to evaluate or determine whether there is a ‘case’ for a particular course of action or intervention. In that paper we also posit a hypothetical model of the impacts of social enterprise-led activities on various social determinants of health, which later serves as a platform for the empirical work reported in Roy et al. (2017) and Macaulay et al. (2018) . Both of those papers represent early conceptual work relating to our five-year ‘CommonHealth’ project ( www.commonhealth.uk ) funded by the UK's Medical Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council. Constructing conceptual models using systematic reviews and/or to synthesize a range of diverse forms of evidence, including from qualitative research, is consistent with best practice within public health research. The Medical Research Council guidelines on developing and evaluating complex health interventions ( Craig et al., 2008 ), for example, suggests modelling processes and outcomes and incorporating stakeholders' views in order to construct mid-range theories, which can later be tested against empirical data. So while the author also contends that we are making a case based (simply) upon the idea that we all we have to go on is the opinions of the people on whom any effects are expected to impact and wider stakeholders, we contend that not only is there no case at present, but even if there was a case, it would not be based upon the opinions of such people alone but, rather, upon a growing body of evidence, including a systematic review, and a five-year programme of research from which we have only started to publish results. We next turn attention to the author's substantive claim: that we are creating ‘false positives’.

PY - 2018/9/28

Y1 - 2018/9/28

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85054815232&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85054815232&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.09.058

DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.09.058

M3 - Letter

C2 - 30336394

AN - SCOPUS:85054815232

SN - 0277-9536

VL - 217

SP - 42

EP - 44

JO - Social Science and Medicine

JF - Social Science and Medicine

ER -