Now,\u00a0we’ve reached the third stage: lessons for\u00a0research methods classes.<\/p>\n
Our instructor is sociologist Zeynep Tufekci<\/a>, writing at The Message<\/a>. Our competing\u00a0hypotheses are three:<\/p>\n 1. Black\u00a0men really do catcall more than other kinds of men.<\/p>\n 2. The people who\u00a0made this video are unconsciously or consciously racist, editing out men of other races.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0The study was badly designed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As Tufekci points out, any one of these could account for\u00a0why so many of the catcallers were black. Likewise,\u00a0all three could be at play at once.<\/p>\n Enter, the data wrangler: Chris Moore at Mass Appeal<\/a>.<\/p>\n Moore and his colleagues looked for landmarks in the video in order to place every instance of harassment on the map of New York City. According to their analysis, over half\u00a0of the harassment occurs on just one street — 125th — in Harlem.<\/p>\n Did the time the\u00a0producers\u00a0spent in Harlem involve\u00a0denser rates of harassment, supporting hypothesis\u00a0#1. Did they spend an extra amount of time in Harlem because they have something against black men? That’d be hypothesis #2. Or is it hypothesis #3: they\u00a0were\u00a0thoughtless about their decisions as to\u00a0where they would do their filming.<\/p>\n Honestly, it’s hard to say without more data, such as knowing how much time they spent in each neighborhood and in neighborhoods not represented in the video. But if it’s true that they failed to sample the streets of New York City in any meaningful way\u00a0— and I suspect it is —\u00a0then\u00a0hypothesis #3 explains\u00a0at least some of why black men are over-represented.<\/p>\n And that fact<\/em> should motivate us all\u00a0to do our\u00a0methods right. If we\u00a0don’t, we\u00a0may end up offering\u00a0accidental and fallacious support\u00a0to\u00a0ideas\u00a0that we\u00a0loathe.<\/p>\n Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First, there were the accolades. More than 100 instances of street harassment\u00a0in a two minute video, testifying powerfully to the routine invasion of women’s lives by male strangers. Then, there was the criticism. How is it, people asked, that\u00a0the majority of the men\u00a0are black? They argued: this video isn’t an indictment of\u00a0men,\u00a0it’s an indictment of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":64933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2095,2098,274,283,285,1760,20063],"class_list":["post-64932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/11\/23.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64932"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65151,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64932\/revisions\/65151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"2\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/11\/23-500x280.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n