I might also have been able to save him the embarrassment of exposing his ignorance of research methods in the social sciences. Indeed, since his essay consisted mainly of an ill-informed assessment of the techniques of qualitative research, I am still wondering how it found its way into a journal of literary criticism, and what ABR readers might have been expected to make of it.

Since Hall chose not to discuss my work with me, there must be some serious doubt about whether he was trying to prepare a fair and well-informed assessment of my research, or whether he simply wanted to denigrate me by misrepresenting it. It’s always easier to unleash a diatribe from the comfort-zone of ignorance.

In any case, I confess to having some misgivings about embarking on this response. The first three hundred words of Hall’s essay were so pointless, so sarcastic, and so snide – and so drenched in hostility towards me – that they call into question the integrity of any attempt by Hall to criticise my work.

What, for example, could be the point of Hall’s ludicrous suggestion that I have somehow kept myself hidden until recently? Apart from its irrelevance to the stated irrelevance of the essay, it overlooks twenty years of fairly constant media exposure.

And what, similarly, could be the point of Hall’s gratuitous remark about my personal appearance? One is left to wonder how an offensive personal remark could be relevant to any assessment of the quality of my professional work, or an appropriate way to begin an essay with an allegedly serious purpose.

But was his purpose serious? He was certainly serious in his attempt to destroy my professional reputation as a researcher – built up over forty years – through dishonesty, malice, and sarcasm. But as his essay slipped deeper and deeper into error, innuendo, and misrepresentation, it became hard to accept that Hall was interested in making anything like a fair or reasonable assessment of my work.

Hall’s description of the ‘committee’ who might have comprised a fictional ‘Hugh Mackay’ was, I assume, a thinly disguised attempt to identify what he takes to be my prejudices, weaknesses, or shortcomings as a researcher. Apart from his ageist assertion that all the members of the committee would be over forty-five (is maturity a crime, suddenly, in public opinion research?), the implication that I have some kind of conservative template which I lay over my data is as offensive as it is unsupportable.

But the real problem is that Hall so comprehensively misrepresents the nature and purpose of my research – and qualitative research in general – that his article amounts to a huge journalistic deception and an intellectual fraud perpetrated on the readers of ABR. Let me count just a few of the ways …

1. The Mackay Report is a straightforward program of public opinion research which makes no claim to ‘engage with issues’ or even to’ stimulate debate’. Had Hall asked me, I would have pointed out that this is an unpretentious project – with none of the grandiose aims he wants to attach to it – conducted for a small number of government and commercial clients (banks, retailers, media groups, manufacturers, marketing companies) who want continuous access to information about the shifting moods of the Australian marketplace. Those clients pay a modest annual subscription in return for the four or five reports we have been producing each year since 1979.

The subscribers themselves determine the ground we cover. I don’t choose the topics for each year’s program; they do. The reports are produced for the exclusive and confidential use of our subscribers, and form the basis of a consulting relationship with them. I might add that the reports are not ‘books’, either, (in case you’re wondering – as I am – why they got a run in ABR): they are typewritten documents, intended for limited, private circulation. I assume Hall obtained access to them in the National Library where they are lodged only because of the requirements of the Copyright Law. (It certainly wasn’t my idea to put them there.)

The purpose of the research is merely to reflect the opinions, attitudes, and values of what might be called ‘the mass market’, since that is what our subscribers are interested in. That purpose is made explicit in the introduction to every report Hall would have read. If our clients want to study the attitudes of specific minority groups (who are represented, but not differentiated, in my reports), they commission special projects to do so. Our reports are necessarily general and contextual, and make no pretence to be otherwise.

If people want grand debates about social issues, they presumably go to someone like Richard Hall. I hope they wouldn’t expect to find a ‘debate’ in an opinion research report and I am astonished by Hall’s suggestion that this kind of descriptive research somehow ‘debases debate’. How could it? These reports are not essays, and to suggest, as Hall does, that a research psychologist might be a ‘new prophet’ is simply silly. Our job is merely to find out people’s opinions about all manner of things. In our reports, we deliberately withhold judgment about whether they should hold those opinions, whether they are right or wrong, or even whether some community debate about those topics is called for.

2. For an essay that set out to examine the language of The Mackay Report, Hall’s effort is, to say the least, inadequate. At one point, he obscurely asserts that ‘the use and abuse of language in all the Mackay publications make an absorbing study, one which George Orwell would have relished’. Later, he suggests that we should scrutinise the language of researchers with care. I agree with that, but his essay never substantiates the dark suggestion that my own language somehow offends. Is it generally devious, deceitful, or manipulative? Careless? Unfaithful to the research data? Syntactically wanting?

I hope Hall isn’t suggesting that my public opinion research reports, written for my particular clientele, should adopt the language of discourse. He dismisses some of the verbatim quotations included in one of our reports as ‘boring bar talk’, yet all I am trying to do is capture the content and idiom of everyday conversation among ordinary people discussing things like raising kids, shopping, banking, watching TV, voting, going on holidays. ‘Bar talk’ is the very stuff of opinion research (much more so, incidentally, than responses to formal survey questions of the kind Hall seems to admire so much).

3. Hall uses a number of journalistic tricks to try to denigrate my work and my standing as a researcher. He quotes in flippant style a comment in my first book, Reinventing Australia, (not my ‘most recent book’, by the way) about the value of time spent with pets, and describes this as an ‘assertion’, as though I’d just made it up. It was, in fact, a reference to some published medical research on the relationship between pet ownership and hypertension.

He quotes some respondents’ comments about recent Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong demolishing houses and replacing them with new homes incompatible with an existing streetscape. This is a view held by some people (which is why it was represented, along with many other views, in one of our reports) but Hall complains that I don’t let ‘the facts spoil a good whinge’. But this was opinion research; nothing more. We were trying to find out what people think and feel. We were not investigating ‘the facts’ about migrant behaviour: that’s someone else’s job.

Hall’s most snide piece of denigration comes when he remarks that I am ‘often dubbed a researcher’, as though this might be stretching things a bit.

My career in public opinion research began in 1955, when I joined McNair (now AGB:McNair) straight out of school. I spent four years there, followed by three years in the audience research department of the ABC, working mainly on statistical measurement of media audience size. For eight years, I ran a research subsidiary of the George Patterson advertising agency (where I began experimenting with qualitative methods) and for the past twenty-five years, I have been running my own research organisation. I have degrees in psychology and philosophy from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University.

In 1985, I was elected a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society, specifically in recognition of my work on the application of qualitative methodology to social research. In 1994, I was elected a Fellow of the Market Research Society of Australia. I have also received an honorary doctorate for my contribution to public opinion research.

I wonder at what point Hall might think I had served my apprenticeship. When, in his view, might I be entitled to call myself (as opposed to ‘often being dubbed’) a researcher?

4. Contrary to Hall’s claim, I am personally involved in the fieldwork for every project in The Mackay Report program. Hall must have known this, if he had read any of my reports: every report specifically mentions my involvement in data collection. Everything he says, therefore, about the reports being written by someone who ‘wasn’t there’ is both false and deliberately misleading. I have spent a large part of my life in the lounge rooms, kitchens, verandahs, and clubs of Australia – urban, suburban, and rural – and much of what I report is material I have gathered first-hand.

Of course I use other researchers as well, simply to ensure that my own analysis and interpretation is not biased in some unconscious way. Every report is based on the analysis and interpretation of at least three researchers, working independently prior to a period of intensive collaboration at the report-planning stage.

As most qualitative research projects in Australia are done by only one researcher working in isolation, I am proud of the care we take in trying to eliminate personal bias from our analysis. I suspect Hall hasn’t got the foggiest idea, by the way, of the complexity or rigour of qualitative data analysis, which is a subject on which I have written and spoken extensively.

5. Our techniques (using both small group discussions and individual interviews) are non-directive. This means we don’t ask questions. Not ever. We introduce a topic, and leave it to our respondents to range over it as they please. It takes a long time, but it’s worth it. It’s in the ruminations that we begin to pick up the subtleties, the contradictions, and the paradoxes which are always present in research of this kind.

Either Hall is blind to our methods (which means he didn’t read the account of them which appears in every report) or he deliberately misrepresents them. To suggest, for example, that we would ever contemplate asking respondents to comment on a question about Australian society like ‘Why are we so slack?’ is merely mischievous. In that particular case, Hall was quoting a chapter heading which, as the report makes clear, is itself a quotation from the free-wheeling discussions which generate our data.

6. Hall mistakenly believes we underrepresent young people. Every report states the age range of our sample, and most include young adults (since they are usually part of the ‘mass market’ of interest to our commercial clients). Hall doesn’t appear to believe that young Australians actually say the things we quote them as saying. (I wonder what research he is using as a basis of comparison with ours?) I note that he studiously avoided mentioning our 1995 report on Young Adults, which focused exclusively on the 18–25 age range, or earlier reports on Mothers & Daughters, Being 19, or Teenagers and Their Parents.

7. One of Hall’s grossest deceptions was in his references to our 1994 report, Men in the ‘90s. It’s tempting to stereotype Hall as a ‘typical’ journalist: this was the only report which he chose to quote at length, and the quotes he used were exclusively about sex. Those quotes were mostly unrelated to the central themes of the report, upon which he offers no comment at all, yet Hall tries to represent them as proof that the report failed to describe the changes in men’s attitudes which have so obviously occurred in response to the women’s movement. (This is a first: I am more commonly criticised for devoting too much attention to the impact of feminism.) In fact, the report describes those changes at length.

8. Hall says that my reports are bland and devoid of contradiction or disagreements. This is the clearest of all the signs that his acquaintance with the material in our eighty-three reports is cursory, to put it kindly. Two of the most commonly used words in my reporting are ‘paradox’ and ‘contradiction’. (In fact, I’m surprised Hall didn’t criticise me for over-using them.)

Every topic we ever study is criss-crossed with contradictory attitudes – and we often find ourselves reporting contradictions which reside within individuals, as well as between them. If The Mackay Report can make one claim, it is that we always try to represent the subtlety and complexity of human attitudes, and never to homogenise data which is, inevitably, messy.

9. At every level, Hall’s analysis is sloppy, trivial, selective, dishonest, or marginal. Eight examples …

• He complains that, as a result of my work, ‘editors don’t need to actually send reporters out to find out what people think’, and manages to make that sound like a criticism of me. If he thinks journalists should do their own public opinion research, why doesn’t he say so?
• He misrepresents the size and structure of our samples (which are, in fact, extraordinarily large by qualitative research standards) and, more importantly, he fails to acknowledge the important theoretical distinctions between qualitative and quantitative sampling.
• Hall wrongly asserts that my second book, Why Don’t People Listen?, is based on my social research program. This is breathtaking stuff, managing to misrepresent an entire book! It is actually a book about the application of communication theory to personal relationships, and has nothing whatever to do with my public opinion research. You’d only have to read the introduction – or even the blurb – to know that.
• He claims that the pressures faced by working mothers are only ‘grudgingly admitted’ in our reports. This is such a radical concealment of the truth that it would be laughable if it were not so dishonest. The Working Housewife, The Family – ‘90s Style and Work and Leisure are just two of many reports which detail – at length – those pressures. And it is fair to say that an acknowledgement of those pressures formed the basis of what is arguably the most significant chapter in Reinventing Australia (Chapter 2.1: New Women and Old Men).
• His passing reference to Why Don’t People Listen? was a classic example of the marginality of his approach. He failed to mention the central purpose of the book (which was to establish some ‘laws’ of human communication) but chose, instead, to criticise one of its most trivial and incidental features: a series of brief fictional interludes, designed to make some of the principles of communication more easily accessible to the general reader. This perfectly legitimate provision of practical examples of the theoretical material is described by Hall as me ‘trying to flesh out’ my conclusions. How amazing that in an essay claiming to assess my work, he would mock that unremarkable technique without offering some critique of the main themes of the book!
• But the same thing happens when he mentions Reinventing Australia. First, he deliberately misrepresents a chapter heading to make it sound as if I still use the unfashionable term ‘New Australian’ in its 1950s sense. (I don’t.) Then he ridicules a minor aspect of the chapter on multiculturalism, while completely ignoring the central thesis of the book itself.
• As a further example of Hall’s sloppiness, he quotes from various Mackay Reports without making it clear whether he is quoting me or my respondents. Inverted commas appear haphazardly: Hall is either careless or else he was deliberately trying to misrepresent me. Neither explanation does his analysis much credit.
• Finally, he makes the outrageous claim that The Mackay Report provides ‘a platform for certain conservative, older Australians to express their deep suspicion of modern mores’. He obviously didn’t read reports like Why Did Labor Win? (1993), DINKs, The Middle Years, The Family – ‘90s Style, Living With Technology, Multiculturalism, Quality, Media Credibility, or Young Adults. If he had, he would know that ‘conservative, older Australians’ take their place in The Mackay Report alongside every other kind of Australian – certainly including the young and the restless. Perhaps he read The Grey Market. Even then, he must have skipped the many references in that report to older respondents’ enthusiasm for many features of contemporary life. But, clearly, he has read very little.

Indeed, that particular claim is so unsustainable by the body of work Hall is purporting to assess that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he started out with a prejudice and merely sought confirmation of it. (People do that kind of thing all the time, of course. I even wrote a book about it. It’s called Why Don’t People Listen?)

10. I will refrain from entering into a technical debate with Hall about the quantitative/qualitative research controversy, except to say that he obviously has no grasp of it. He adopts a tone which suggests he has some authority in the field of opinion research and methodology, yet he appears oblivious to the fact that in academic, political, and commercial settings around the world, there is growing respect for the peculiar contribution which qualitative (non-statistical, diagnostic) research can make to our overall understanding of human attitudes and behaviour. It can never tell the whole story, of course, and I would be the last person to claim it could.

Strangely enough, l have only been attacked as savagely as this on one previous occasion, and that was when a number of qualitative researchers criticised me for being too strict in setting standards for the conduct of qualitative research (especially in relation to sampling and the often abused group discussion technique).

But Hall’s pro-quantitative bias is clear: he refers to a ‘properly compiled quantitative survey’ as though he is unaware of any of the emerging principles of sampling or ‘proper’ project design in qualitative research. Perhaps he isn’t pretending to be unaware of them; perhaps he really is.

He reveals his outmoded views on the subject by asserting that qualitative research is useful for getting ‘the immediate response of group members to product labels’. If there’s one thing qualitative research has turned out not to be good at, it’s that. If you want to test something as specific as the effectiveness of product labels, quantitative research is the way to go.

I am puzzled by Hall’s attack, and by ABR’s decision to publish it. I welcome debate about my methods and discussion of my findings. But Hall’s vituperative and uninformed assault on my reputation could hardly be called constructive, based, as it is, on a transparent lack of understanding of the very techniques he wants to criticise and a careless glance at very few of the eighty-three Mackay Reports so far produced.

And this from the man who accuses my research of ‘debasing debate’.