Hello, you (shall we walk in a sample’s shoes?)

I don’t remember who, but someone in my 1980s radio career once advised me to speak as if I were addressing only one person, not the whole audience. So, it’s not, “Hello everybody,” it’s, “Hello, you.”

Today’s science reporters face the challenge of getting through to both editors and audiences, and I don’t envy them (well, I do envy them, but not because their jobs are easy). One tool of the trade is the personalized interpretation of science results. It’s a shame, because it mushes up the science in ways that probably contribute to common problems of scientific illiteracy.

The attention-grabbing “you” in science reporting headlines is the problem I’m concerned with here. It often adds an unrealistic level of certainty to science results.

Case in point is the widely circulated Op-Ed in the New York Times unfortunately titled, “Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay.” The piece drew from a study that found a positive relationship between “implicit” homosexuality and homophobic attitudes among people who say they are 100% straight. Implicit homosexuality was determined by tripping people up with subliminal messages (“ME”) flashed on the screen

I read it as carefully as I could for a study outside my expertise, and nowhere does it say what proportion of homophobic people are actually driven by such repressed sexual orientations. It’s interesting that it happens at all, and it’s plausible, but does it “cause” any significant amount of the widespread anti-gay attitudes and actions we see? Maybe. For what it’s worth, if I read it right the variation in homophobia explained (R-squared) in the experiments was in the neighborhood of 5%.

Another recent study drew headlines such as, “Why your doctor should be trim.” The actual finding in the study – which is quite dramatic – was this:

physicians with normal BMI were more likely to engage their obese patients in weight loss discussions as compared to overweight/obese physicians (30% vs. 18%, P = 0.010).

But think about it. Weight loss is something that doctors should at least discuss with their obese patients. But the great majority of doctors don’t — 70% or 82% – according to the study, depending on their weight.

This could be a social problem. But should this study be used to advise patients to seek thin doctors? If you want a doctor that discusses weight loss with you, it’s much more efficient to ask a doctor to discuss it with you than it is to shop for a thin doctor (and hope you get one of the few that discusses weight loss). And if your fat doctor won’t discuss weight loss, I recommend finding a new doctor (of any weight), rather than trying to get your doctor to lose weight!

In other words, turning the study results into personal advice ends up turning patients away from what matters — their relationship with their doctor, which they can directly observe and act upon — and toward a superficial feature (weight) that might or might not contribute to it.

Here are some other recent examples:

• “Why your left side is your best side,” from a study showing more positive average reactions to left-sided portraits (even when they’re reversed to look like right-sided portraits) — but the “why” in the analysis is speculative.
• “Why your kid isn’t creative,” about a new book that “synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity” and concludes that “our education system and social mores discourage creativity.”
• “Back pain on the job? It could be your bad attitude,” from a finding that 1 out of 5 people who went to the doctor for back pain had a “persistent” condition, and those 1-in-5 were more likely to have negative attitudes about it. (The other 4 out of 5 may have just hurt their backs, and their attitudes weren’t discussed.)

Show me the distribution

Part of my frustration is with psychology studies in particular, which often don’t include a simple cross-tabulation or descriptive table that allows the reader to assess the overall pattern and the strength of the relationship. Any statistical association can be pitched as today’s must-read take-home message. But how big a deal is it in individual real life?

Take education and income, which are certainly strongly, causally related. Here is data from 40 random women, drawn from the 2010 American Community Survey:

This variable alone accounts for 17% of the variation in earnings among these 40 women, and the relationship is highly significant statistically. That strong a relationship is unusual in the typical flow of newsworthy social science studies. Yet look how much variation there is around the line.

If you only knew one thing about a woman and had to guess her income, education level would be a good place to start. But when it comes to personal advice — to understanding our own lives — we know so much more than that. Only then — for example, after we have narrowed down the pool to college-educated, professional suburbanites between 40 and 50 years old — do the studies about women’s negotiating ability, shoe style, and so on, make a big difference. Marginal things matter, but for most people they’re not the causal story. Put another way, they matter more for populations than they do for individual readers.

This reminds me of Mitt Romney saying to that college student who was worried about the economy:

What I can promise you is this: when you get out of college, if I’m elected, you will have a job. If President Obama’s re-elected, you will not be able to get a job.

The unemployment rate is 4.9% for people with a BA degree. How much does Romney think it will vary according to the presidential election outcome? Or, put another way: “Unemployed? It could be your president.”

Recession divorce paper preview

8:30 AM, Thursday, May 3: Be at the first session of the Population Association of American conference to hear me present, “Divorce and the Recession, 2008-2010″ (and three other interesting papers on the how the recession has affected families).

The presentation version of my paper is now available as a Maryland Population Research Center Working Paper. Here are a few highlights and additions.

This analysis supersedes some of my earlier musings about divorce fluctuations, which have been quite inconsistent (here’s the whole series). I once reported a positive relationship between rising unemployment and rising divorce rates — but no increase in Google searches on divorce. But then my Google method turned up what looked like an increase in divorce-related searching – by which point I was skeptical that there was in fact dominant effect of the recession that is discernible in the short run. And now I don’t see an unemployment pattern to speak of.

The conference paper is the most I can do with what we now have — big-sample data from 2008-2010. As I noted before, there is a drop in divorce rates from 2008 to 2010, but that hides a rebound from 2009 to 2010; that pattern holds when individuals factors are controlled. In the context of a long-run decline in divorce rates, I don’t make much of that. At the state level, this my story:

After establishing an individual level model predicting women’s divorce, I test whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce, and for whom. Results show that foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce, but only for those with more than a high school education. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. I also test the effect of state laws delaying divorce, and find they have an increasingly negative effect of the three-year period, suggesting a backlog of new divorces during the recession.

The interpretation of those state law patterns — a late addition to the paper — is up for discussion. Anyway, here’s the figure showing the foreclosure pattern by education level, from a model that controls for individual characteristics and state fixed effects:

Maybe this means marriages in which people are more likely to own homes are more at risk of real estate shocks, but that’s pretty indirect. There might be a fancy way to work that out, with a prediction model for which of these divorced people probably owned a home before divorce (be my guest!).

Those state patterns are built on an individual model shown in this figure. Bars that point left show negative effects on divorce odds, bars that point right are for increased risks.

None of these patterns are surprising given past research, but it’s very nice to have recent big-data estimates as new benchmarks.

Finally, I updated the Google analysis, because I couldn’t resist. The trend for a basic “divorce” search, which I used previously, was seriously diverted by the something called “the Kardashian event” in October 2011. How much did this mess up the data? This much:

Partly for that reason, this time I stuck with lawyer searches: “divorce lawyer,” “divorce attorney,” and “family law attorney,” which are all pretty well correlated over time. This is the trend (dates on the x-axis appear at the end of each year):

I could interpret this as consistent with the divorce/recession lull-rebound hypothesis, but time will tell. It doesn’t fit well from 2004 to 2008, since divorce rates were probably falling during most of that time. Still, that’s a pretty rapid rise at the end. If there isn’t an increase in divorce in 2011/2012, remind me to report that this method didn’t work.

Flattering motherhood, still

I offered the first draft of this — for free — to the major newspapers, to no avail. In the meantime, there have been some great short pieces written on the recent motherhood-is-work kerfuffle. I don’t remember them all, but I liked those by Katha Pollitt, Nancy Folbre, Adia Harvey Wingfield, Barbara Risman, Laura Flanders, Feminist Hulk, and Linda Hirshman. The feminist field on this issue has been crowded, which is great.

* * *

Hopefully we can agree that that the true measure of motherhood is somewhere between “toughest job in the world” and “nothing.”

On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus.

On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work.”* For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously declared: “The days of something for nothing are over.” President Obama and Mitt Romney both support that welfare reform.

Of course parenthood is work. But it’s really many jobs, not one. And now that more and more of them are also available for a fee — as real jobs — we can see how much the “market” thinks they’re really worth. Answer: not much. When sold as services, the many tasks of parenthood are disproportionately done by women. Some of its core tasks – such as cooking, cleaning, diaper-changing and laundry – are among the lowest-paid, most demeaning, female-dominated occupations.

Source: My calculations from 2010 American Community Survey.

As I wrote before, when it comes to reproductive labor, there’s work and there’s work:

Katha Pollitt made this point more eloquently in her column:

But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. … When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself.

Instead of the money men get for their labors, mothers are asked to settle for less money and a rhetorical pat on the head (if they are middle class “moms” instead of merely poor mothers — I think that’s known in economics as a “compensating differential“). As Barbara Ehrenreich put it, nobody ever put motherhood on a pedestal until feminists pointed out that “the pay is lousy and the career ladder is nonexistent.”

Still, the universal agreement that motherhood is “work” marks a genuine moment. Among other possible interpretations, it is a victory of “choice” feminism – which would have us “respect women in all the choices they make,” in the words of the newfound feminist Mrs. Romney. (Work = respect, nowadays in America, though it wasn’t always that way.) But celebrating the choice to do something most women can’t choose is the dangerous outcome of putting motherhood on a pedestal. It divides women according to the value of their motherhood.

Accepting pedestal status instead of equality is a bargain some feminists have refused for a century or more. One of those was Harriet Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter), who wrote in 1908: “Of all the people who block the progress of woman suffrage, the worst are the women of wealth and leisure who never knew a day’s work and never felt a day’s want, but who selfishly stand in the way of those women who know what it means to earn the bread they eat by the sternest toil” (emphasis added).

Parenthood won’t get the respect it deserves – including men embracing it in more equal numbers – until the monetary reward it draws matches the rhetoric of its symbolic value. That means recognizing the real value of parents’ sternest toils – even if they’re not married – from which we all benefit.

–

*California Gov. Pete Wilson, Washington Times, 12/7/1995, p. A21.

At crunch time, what do students tweet?

Here are the more interesting words from about 250 tweets with the words ["soc" + "paper"] in them from the last day or two. I removed some boring common words (such as research, test, done, due, page, writing):

Here are the emoticons from those tweets, scaled according to frequency:

I was also surprised to see a steady stream (a few per day) of students discussing various forms of cheating and plagiarism. Do they know this stuff is public? For these I covered the names, so the guilty wouldn’t come after me. Also, to show this isn’t just a sociology student phenomenon, I included a few from a ["psych" + "paper"] search:

Gender of kids, gender of parents (via color preference)

The Archives of Sexual Behavior has published my paper, “Children’s Gender and Parents’ Color Preferences,” as an online-first article. The abstract is up here, but the paper is paywalled — let me know if you’d like one of my personal copies and I’ll be glad to send it to you.

I did the research because I was interested in the effect that today’s strongly-gendered parenting might have on the adults who live in the color-coded worlds of their children. Also, I was looking for a simple way to test whether, or to what extent, color preferences were variable in adulthood (rather than genetic), and the gender of children seemed like a good, mostly-random experiment to test that.

Anyway, here is the basic breakdown of how my 749 parent respondents answered the online question, “Which color do you most prefer?” The colors here are the same ones they saw online (individual monitors vary, of course), ordered according to relative gender preference:

Pink, purple and red tend more female; green, blue and orange tend more male. In the statistical tests, with an age control, only blue, red, purple and pink had big enough gender differences to reach 95% confidence.

Then I compared people who had boys only and girls only to those who had a mix of boys and girls. The result was most clear for women: those with boys only had more “female” preferences — preferred pink more and blue less. For men, having either boys-only or girls-only increased their odds of preferring blue.

Here’s the pattern for women (with no controls):

The article has little in the way of discussion and speculation — the text is only six journal pages. My post-hoc interpretation is that gender-heavy environments (single-gender gaggles of children) push parents in gender-stereotypical directions. Maybe. I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Start to finish: 750 days

This is the only time I’ve ever collected my own data for a project and seen it all the way to publication. For those interested in the process, this is how it went:

• March 17, 2010: Working on the chapter about gender for my family sociology textbook, I blogged about the research I was reading regarding color preferences.
• April 18, 2010: More blogging, this time about the far-fetched evolutionary psychology I was reading on the reasons for gendered color preferences.
• April 21, 2010: Posted the survey online at Surveymonkey.com, launched with a blog post and other social media.
• April 26, 2010: Submitted an application to my local Institutional Review Board for permission to do the survey.
• May 3, 2010: After one minor revision, the IRB approved it, and that gave me the green light for a UNC email blast.
• May 4, 2010: “What’s Your Favorite Color?” email blast to UNC students, staff and faculty. More than 1,000 responses on the first day.
• September 16, 2010: Stopped collecting responses. (The survey is still up there, though, drifting unmanned around the Internet, gathering data like so many comments on a dead blog.)
• February 4, 2011: Submitted manuscript to Archives of Sexual Behavior.
• June 21, 2011: Nudged the editor to see what was up with the review.
• July 16, 2011: Received a revise-and-resubmit decision.
• September 28, 2011: Resubmitted.
• February 11, 2012: Received provisional acceptance.
• March 7, 2012: Resubmitted.
• March 19, 2012: Received proofs from the journal to review.
• April 5, 2012: Article published online.

NYC pre-K G&T testing off the charts, ugh edition

A few years ago I wrote about the testing arms race in New York, which the school system encouraged as a way to keep rich families from going private. Today I repost that story, after a news update from today’s NYT:

Nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted and talented kindergarten seats in New York City public schools in the fall, 22 percent more than last year and more than double the number four years ago, setting off a fierce competition for the most sought-after programs in the system.

On their face, the results … paint a portrait of a city in which some neighborhoods appear to be entirely above average. In Districts 2 and 3, which encompass most of Manhattan below 110th Street, more students scored at or above the 90th percentile on the entrance exam, the cutoff point, than scored below it.

Some parents who spent big bucks on pre-K training camp, and achieved 95th+ percentile scores, are naturally upset about possibly not getting spots. This seems bonkers — is there any real pedagogical justification for segregating kids based on test scores at age 4?

Here’s the previous post, with some updated links:

The New York public schools are desperate to keep high-income families in the system. High income parents would like to save for college instead of paying for kindergarten. These two forces have been brought together by a kindergarten test prep industry that trains 4-year-olds on how to beat the “gifted-and-talented” (or whatever they call it these days) admissions tests and get into the better public schools. For $1,000 or so, you can improve your chances at a 5-year stint in a premium public.

A couple hours of preparation and many students can at least learn to pay attention long enough to hear the questions, and get a feel for the format.

According to the Times, the real elite schools are incensed:

“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”

In a lot of places, rich parents can get their kids into the schools they want by just picking where they live (shout out to my own Chapel Hill). New York presents a problem for that strategy.

Of course, parents make money partly so they can pass advantages along to their children, so don’t take this is moralizing against those parents. Maybe this is what it takes to keep middle-class parents bought in to the public school system – an update on what we used to call “tracking.” It just highlights the problems that come with an unequal education system.

Maybe the public schools should just let parents pay extra and choose their school or program, and compete directly with the privates. This seems like a back-door solution with unfortunate consequences for children’s sense of self-worth.

Why are mothers becoming moms?

Listening to the debate about motherhood in the last few days reminded me of something that’s been nagging me for a while: what does it mean that mothers are becoming moms?

On the Republican side, in his NRA speech Friday, Mitt Romney said, “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.” (The right-wing radio personality Laura Schlesinger always said, by way of introduction, “I am my kids’ mom,” as the most salient piece of her identity.) On the other side, both Hilary Rosen and President Obama used mom as the toughest-job-in-the-world’s title.

Why is it mom? Back in the 90s, poor single women weren’t “welfare moms.”

Here’s the trend in “working mother” versus “working mom” from Google Ngrams – the occurrence of these terms in the Google Books database:

The same pattern appears with just mother versus mom.

I don’t know why this is happening or what it means. Do you?