Comments on: That Catcalling Video: Research Methods Edition

By: Tir

Tir — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 07:11:00 +0000

Meh, only men found this video interesting. Women go through this stuff daily and who catcalls you really depends on where you are walking.

By: sammymcgee

sammymcgee — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 19:11:00 +0000

so your suspicion that their sample was bad is now a fact? please, don’t bother posting about quantitative data if you’re going to pass off your opinion as truth.

By: Graham

Graham — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 11:34:00 +0000

So there’s a video designed to show that men are uncouth, sexist pigs. It does that. No questions need be asked. But, hang on, it suggests that black men might be worse than white men. Quick, call in the methodological critiques, something must be wrong.

By: james

james — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 09:32:00 +0000

There is no “simply” claiming, especially not in this context. The video is making use of a research method to rationalize that a high percentage of males are intruding a woman (which is dressed is a particular way). If you make such a claims, make sure you are transparent about your data. Now it’s almost like a garbage can model: solution looking for a problem :)

By: Lunad

Lunad — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 02:33:00 +0000

no, I’m pretty sure the point is that it can’t.

By: Alison

Alison — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:29:00 +0000

Welcome to the field of sociology

By: Kali

Kali — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 21:11:00 +0000

The video simply claims to show the ubiquity of street harassment in a major US city, which it succeeds in doing. It does not claim to show a representative sample of harassers by race, class, age etc. nor should it be required to do so (other than to avoid consciously manipulating the results to present a biased view).

By: Sociology/Anthropology In the News! | soanstolaf

Sociology/Anthropology In the News! | soanstolaf — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 19:40:31 +0000

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By: robert e

robert e — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 18:07:00 +0000

A fourth possibility is logistical issues and/or laziness. Morningside Heights, where most of the footage is from, could have been the project’s home base. It’s also possible that catcalling in Manhattan is more prevalent around campuses, or simply more prevalent in Morningside Heights. We can’t know for sure unless all the footage is released.

I can attest that in the very ethnically diverse American city where I live, black men appear to catcall much more than other groups. I’m told that it’s a “black culture” thing, but what I see suggests that (like many things in this country that are associated with race) it has more to do with class culture.

By: Bill R

Bill R — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 17:53:00 +0000

So people having at least some education on scientific methods really believed this video could be used as representative data for research?

Wow.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:07:00 +0000

For a different set of data on street harassment in New York, check out Hollaback NYC’s map of reported incidents. At a glance, it looks like the highest density is in South Manhattan, which could suggest some sampling problems with the video. On the other hand, Hollaback’s data is anonymous, voluntary self-reporting, so it’s probably biased in different ways. Anyway, it’s an interesting comparison. http://nyc.ihollaback.org/

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 14:17:00 +0000

How interesting, that the video has become so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even need to be named or linked.

It’s important to recognize that, whatever its methods, the video was an advertisement, and not a research study. Its “results” are heavily manipulated by necessity – editing 10 supposed hours of footage down to a representative sample of encounters would have resulted in something that had nothing to do with the original point at all. And we don’t really know to what extent the setup was manipulated to obtain the desired results – only that, for its purposes, the catcalls were clearly the desired results.