Roy Morgan has released its annual Image Of Professions survey for 2010, where the public rate various professions on their perceived levels of honesty and ethical standards. To get the rankings, Roy Morgan asks the following question:
As I say different occupations, could you please say — from what you know or have heard – which rating best describes how you, yourself, would rate or score people in various occupations for honesty and ethical standards (Very High, High, Average, Low, Very Low)?
Morgan then tallies up the Very High and High responses and publishes that percentage for each occupation. This year’s rankings come in like this:
The usual suspects come in at both the top and the bottom, with Nurses, Pharmacists and Doctors gaining the largest proportion of high and very high responses – while Car Salesman, Advertising People, Estate Agents, Newspaper Journalists and Stock Brokers come in at the bottom. This survey came from a sample of 672 – around the sample size that this phone survey usually uses every year – giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3.8% mark. The changes for each occupation since last year’s results were between + and – 4%, which statistically makes no significant change for any occupation over the last 12 months.
So instead, it might be worth having a look at more robust levels of change in the ethical and honesty perceptions of various occupations over longer periods of time.
If we take the average of the results for the 2009-2010 surveys as our current baseline, we can compare it to the average of the 1999-2000 results, the 1989-1990 results and the 1979-1981 results (1981 because no survey was taken in 1980). This will give us an estimate of how honesty and integrity perceptions have changed for various professions over a 10, 20 and 30 year period. Running through the results, we get:
On the professions that have pretty much tanked in the honesty and ethics perception department, Bank Managers over the long terms and Ministers of Religion over the short term lead the way. Looking at the time series of these two, it tells it’s own story:
Minister of Religion was only added as an occupation to the survey in 1996 – but it would have been interesting to know whether their fall was mostly driven by the world wide child abuse scandals that exploded in the 1990′s, or whether their fall was actually more representative of some perception of institutional decline that may have been in operation for period going farther back than 1996.
Bank Managers are another interesting movement, where their decline in perceived honesty and ethical standards pretty much matched the decline in actual power of bank managers. Back before the financial deregulation of the 1980′s, bank managers were a very powerful figure in most local communities – where a very large proportion of all home loans and personal loans approved by a bank required the personal approval of the local bank manager.
As new financial institutions flooded Australia and added competition to the broad domestic loans market, the loans approval mechanism for the sector as a whole became more reliant on a statistical approach to risk management and the ability of the customer to pay, and much less reliant on the personal whimsy and cultural baggage of a given bank manager.
It’s often not appreciated just how dramatically this changed Australia. As a result of moving to a more robust mechanism for loan approval, we saw a large growth in home and business loans to females – particularly single parent females – as well as young people. Meritocracy replaced cultural orthodoxy to a large extent when it came to the domestic credit market. So it’s interesting to see how the honesty and ethical standards perceptions of bank managers effectively collapsed as their actual power collapsed.
On the upside of the ratings, School Teachers and Doctors have experienced the largest long term growth, pretty much moving together.
I suppose this begs the question of why school teachers and doctors had such mediocre ratings back in the late 1970′s, as well as why those perceptions have been consistently improving – especially in the 20 year period between 1980 and 2000?
16 Comments
Yes! Beat the Dentists!
I can’t speak for doctors, but I can hesitate a guess at why teachers have significantly improved: quite simply, Standards Based Assessment.
The mid-1980s saw the introduction of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) which meant teachers were required to assess students against specific outcomes and whether they met them or not. Prior to the mid-1980s assessments could be much more subjectively graded, and thus if a teacher really disliked a student they could award poorer grades and there was little recourse the student could take. OBE has now been superseded by Standards Based Assessment where students’ grades are based on whether or not they have met a particular standard.
Not very sexy, I know, but the increased professionalism that has accompanied SBA has meant that even if teachers are not particularly enamoured of a student, they can’t mark them down simply due to personality conflicts.
I imagine there is quite a bit more to it as well, but I think that fundamental change in educational structure has had a significant impact.
More people finishing school?
This is quite comparable to results for similar US surveys. See
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx
I find a few of the results curious, including that of my own profession – engineering. The rating for honesty of engineers has risen. I wouldn’t say that the ethical training of engineers now has changed in any significant way over the 1970s or 80s. What has changed is the public perception of problems related to engineering infrastructure. Perhaps now people believe us more when we say that water supply and transport are problems, because the evidence is more obvious to them. But many honest engineers warned of the looming problems in the 1990s, and were largely ignored.
Likewise I see the reputation of pharmacists and university lecturers rising, even though people I know in both express concerns about them being increasingly compromised by comercial pressures.
Finally it is a pity there is no category for local government Councillors. Despite the reputation of State and Federal politicians, in my experience local government is often the least scrutinised and grubbiest level of politics. Too often, it is government of the real estate agents, by the real estate agents for the real estate agents. “Rats in the Ranks” made the point well. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Everyone loves nurses. Now, how about some pay and conditions to go with that respect?
The increase in the police rating is interesting, given the major scandals that have hit several police forces. Or do people believe the reactions to these scandals cleaned things up?
The professions where the job description requires selling a story – MPs, lawyers, advertising people, journalists, car salesmen, insurance advisers, union leaders – tend to do badly. We know that they may not believe what they are saying themselves, and so mark them down.
It would however be interesting to see the full results of this survey, which I have never seen Morgan publish ie, ratings for ‘average’ or ‘low’ and ‘very low’. Personally I would rate most of the storyteller occupations as ‘average’ on the whole – not as fundamentally dishonest, but requiring more scepticism than people in other occupations.
It’s odd that the most “untrustworthy” are the ones that the public at large most believes when forming political opinions – MPs, union leaders, journo’s, talk-back announcers…..If we all agree these people are are so untrustworthy, why do we keep listening to their opinions and voting the same fools in? Maybe we need to hear from nurses, doctors, teachers & engineers at election time…..and maybe some of them could find it in their hearts to go into politics…..
melt 72
That is one of the reasons I like to post on Pollbludger on topics I have some knowledge of. However as an engineer who was a member of the Labor Party for some years, in the end I found that branch members had almost no influence over party policy, while the chance of a branch member becominga major office holder was equally slim. Anyeon could becoem a candidate in an unwinnable seat, but you seemed to need factional or union connections going back to your uni days or earlier to have a chance of pre-selection in a winnable seat. Plus the danger from politicising your career if you were a public servant meant that it was not an opton I’d consider without having paid off the mortgage first.
I am not suggesting things are any better in the Liberal party either.
Dear Poss,
I realise my question will not be precisely in your area of expertise, as you do not cover the arse end of the market. However, I really would like an answer. Pretty please.
It is this…Who, and how do pollsters establish the hatred and the sheer stupidity, of the Andrew Bolt end of the market when it comes to the vague statistics such as ‘forty percent of the voting population are opposed to immigration’?
How is this figure established? If I want to hear good old-fashioned hatred positively seeping out of people’s pores I’d switch on one of the shock-jock radio stations at prime time.
(But these sort of people don’t strike me as being approachable for polling purposes, they’d be too exhausted from listening to their fellow haters on the radio.)
Which is a long-winded way of asking..1) Are these figures correct? 2) What sort of people are they? (Apart from being fairly recent immigrants themselves.) 3)Or, how do we really know how the percentages are worked out? Because I don’t think these sorts of people would answer the normal sorts of polls. Your sort of polls.
melt – you have hit on the sheer idiocy that abounds in Australia.
That such people are listened to and their advice followed, despite the figures revealed above, is surely the act of irrational minds. Taking advice from the village idiot means the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
Directors of public con panies sounds about right!
@ SANCHO I was a nurse for over 45 years, so thank you for your kind comments. This “pay and conditions” question is a strange one. My observations over those years told me that nurses have always “bitched” about these things, but it really only became an issue over the last 20 years or so, coinciding with the degree status at entry level.
Now, everyone is going to think I’m an idiot, but I would do it all again regardless of the pay and conditions. It gave me so much, and I hope I gave the people in my care everything I could. And I think there are a lot of nurses who would agree with me, and some who would not. That’s life!
BTW, I am tertiary educated in health.
hey, i’m a nurse – uni trained – and i get paid really well. in fact, i’m probably in the top 2% of earners in australia. same for me, CML – it’s been a pleasure.
What about Jockey’s, The Racing industry employs thousands