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2011
2010
These posts appeared on Scientopia thanks to a Guest Blogging opportunity in 2011.
This commercial is good evidence that we still think nothing of being cruel towards people deemed “overweight”:
Via Copyranter.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
At Flowing Data, the Venn Diagram illustrated by a platypus playing a keytar. Go there.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Cross-posted at Family Inequality.
Poverty is usually described as a status, as there are people below and above the poverty line. We need to do more to capture and represent the experience of poverty.
There are ways this can be done even in a single survey question, such as this one: ”During the past 12 months, was there any time when you needed prescription medicine but didn’t get it because you couldn’t afford it?” Below are the percentages answering affirmatively, by official poverty-line status.
Percentage of Adults Aged 18-64 Who Did Not Get Needed Prescription Drugs Because of Cost, by Poverty Status (National Health Interview Survey, 1999-2010)
This is not the same as not having any of the prescription drugs you need. What it indicates is economic insecurity rather than deprivation per se, a more nuanced measure than simply being above or below (some percentage of) the poverty line.
Cross-posted at Family Inequality.
Things that make you say… “peer review”?
This is the time of year when I expect to read inflated or distorted claims about the benefits of marriage and religion from the National Marriage Project. So I was happy to see the new State of Our Unions report put out by W. Bradford Wilcox’s outfit. My first reading led to a few questions.
First: When they do the “Survey of Marital Generosity” — the privately funded, self-described nationally-representative sample of 18-46-year old Americans, which is the source of this and several other reports, none of them published in any peer-reviewed source I can find — do they introduce themselves to the respondents by saying, “Hello, I’m calling from the Survey of Marital Generosity, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about…” If this were the kind of thing subject to peer review, and I were a reviewer, I would wonder if the respondents were told the name of the survey.
Second: When you see oddly repetitive numbers in a figure showing regression results, don’t you just wonder what’s going on?
Here’s what jumped out at me:
If a student came to my office with these results and said, “Wow, look at the big effect of joint religious practice on marital success,” I’d say, “Those numbers are probably wrong.” I can’t swear they didn’t get exactly the same values for everyone except those couples who both attend religious services regularly — 50 50 50, 13 13 13 , 50 50 50, 21 21 21 — in a regression that adjusts for age, education, income, and race/ethnicity, but that’s only because I don’t swear.*
Of course, the results are beside the point in this report, since the conclusions are so far from the data anyway. From this figure, for example, they conclude:
In all likelihood, the experience of sharing regular religious attendance — that is, of enjoying shared rituals that endow one’s marriage with transcendent significance and the support of a community of family and friends who take one’s marriage seriously— is a solidifying force for marriage in a world in which family life is increasingly fragile.
OK.
Anyway, whatever presumed error led to that figure seems to reoccur in the next one, at least for happiness:
Just to be clear with the grad student example, I wouldn’t assume the grad student was deliberately cooking the data to get a favorable result, because I like to assume the best about people. Also, people who cook data tend to produce a little more random-looking variation. Also, I would expect the student not to just publish the result online before anyone with a little more expertise had a look at it.
Evidence of a pattern of error is also found in this figure, which also shows predicted percentages that are “very happy,” when age, education, income and race/ethnicity are controlled.
Their point here is that people with lots of kids are happy (which they reasonably suggest may result from a selection effect). But my concern is that the predicted percentages are all between 13% and 26%, while the figures above show percentages that are all between 50% and 76%.
So, in addition to the previous figures probably being wrong, I don’t think this one can be right unless they are wrong. (And I would include “mislabeled” under the heading “wrong,” since the thing is already published and trumpeted to the credulous media.)
Publishing apparently-shoddy work like this without peer review is worse when it happens to support your obvious political agenda. One is tempted to believe that if the error-prone research assistant had produced figures that didn’t conform to the script, someone higher up might have sent the tables back for some error checking. I don’t want to believe that, though, because I like to assume the best about people.
* Just kidding. I do swear.
In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.
In the four-minute video below, Kate Pickett argues that once societies develop the capacity to enable status-based consumption (as opposed to survival-oriented consumption), status-consciousness among humans exacerbates inequality. Meanwhile, being status-conscious in a highly unequal society creates stress, and all kinds of other negative outcomes, among those who are judged less-than.
See Dr. Pickett, also, on why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer. And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control recently released a report on domestic violence and sexual assault in the U.S. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Summary Report presents the results of phone surveys (targeting both landlines and cells) of 18,049 randomly-selected adults conducted in 2010. The results are predictably depressing: 18.3% adult women have experienced rape (defined as attempted or completed forced penetration) in their lifetimes (for men, it’s 1.4%):
Undermining the stranger rapist myth, the report found that the vast majority of perpetrators were acquaintances or partners of their victims.
As has been found in other studies, Native American women are more at risk than other racial group for sexual assault; in this study, those identifying multiracial had the highest rates of all:
Almost a third of women who are raped are victimized before they’re 18, while over a third are young adults aged 18-24:
Risk of rape varies significantly by state, though in no state did fewer than 10% of women report being raped. Virginia had the lowest levels of victimization of women, at 11.4%; other states on the low end include Tennessee, Delaware, and Rhode Island. Worst was Alaska, at 29.2%, with Oregon not far behind at 27.2% and Nevada at 26.1%.
The report also include information on stalking and domestic violence; 16.2% of women and 5.2% of men report at least one incident, overwhelmingly from an intimate partner, while over 30% of women and 25% of men have been slapped, shoved, or pushed by a partner.
It is a singularly depressing read about the state of men’s and women’s intimate lives.
