Science finds tiny things nowadays (Malia edition)

We have to get used to living in a world where science — even social science — can detect really small things. Understanding how important really small things are, and how to interpret them, is harder nowadays than just finding them.

Remember when Hanna Rosin wrote this?

One of the great crime stories of the last twenty years is the dramatic decline of sexual assault. Rates are so low in parts of the country — for white women especially — that criminologists can’t plot the numbers on a chart.

Besides being wrong about rape (it has declined a lot, but it’s still high compared with most countries), this was a funny statement about science (I’ve heard we can even plot negative numbers now!). But the point is we have problems understanding, and communicating about, small things.

So, back to names.

In 2009, the peak year for the name Malia in the U.S., 1,681 girls were given that name, according to the Social Security Administration, or .041% of the 4.14 million children born that year (there are no male Malias in the SSA’s public database, meaning they have never recorded more than 4 in one year). That year, 7.5% of women ages 18-44 had a baby. If my arithmetic is right, say you know 100 women ages 18-44, and each of them knows 100 others (and there is no overlap in your network). That would mean there is a 30% chance one of your 10,000 friends of a friend had a baby girl and named her Malia in 2009. But probably there is a lot of overlap; if your friend-of-friend network is only 1,000 women 18-44 then that chance would fall to 3%.

Here is the trend in girls named Malia, relative to the total number of girls born, from 1960 to 2016:

To make it easier to see the Malias, here is the same chart with the y-axis on a log scale.

This shows that Malia has been on a long upward trend, from less than 50 per year in the 1960s to more than 1,000 per year now. And it also shows a pronounced spike in 2009, the year Malia peaked .041%. In that year, the number of people naming daughters Malia jumped 75% before declining over the next three years to resume it’s previous trend. Here is the detail on the figure, just showing the Malia in 2005-2016:

What happened there? We can’t know for sure. Even if you asked everyone why they named their kid what they did, I don’t know what answers you would get. But from what we know about naming patterns, and their responsiveness to names in the news (positive or negative), it’s very likely that the bump in 2009 resulted from the high profile of Barack Obama and his daughter Malia, who was 11 when Obama was elected.

What does a causal statement like that that really mean? In 2009, it looks to me like about 828 more people named their daughters Malia than would have otherwise, taking into account the upward trend before 2008. Here’s the actual trend, with a simulated trend showing no Obama effect:

Of course, Obama’s election changed the world forever, which may explain why the upward trend for Malia accelerated again after 2013. But in this simple simulation, which brings the “no Obama” trend back into line with the actual trend in 2014, there were 1,275 more Malias born than there would have been without the Obama election. This implies that over the years 2008-2013, the Obama election increased the probability of someone naming their daughter Malia by .00011, or .011%.

That is a very small effect. I think it’s real, and very interesting. But what does it mean for anything else in the world? This is not a question of statistical significance, although those tools can help. (These names aren’t a probability sample, it’s a list of all names given.) So this is a question for interpreting research findings now that we have these incredibly powerful tools, and very big data to analyze with them. The number alone doesn’t tell the story.

What’s with the historical trend juxtapositions?

When is it OK to juxtapose historical trends?

You have to watch out for this (via Boing Boing):

There is no reason to suspect that the rise in autism is linked to the rise in organic food sales.

But other times it seems reasonable to me, like this:

There are lots of reasons the long-run decline in fertility is related to the rise in women’s employment rates. We know from lots of research that women with more children are less likely to have jobs; women with jobs are less likely to have children; and over time the proportion of women in the second group has grown relative to the first.

So it’s OK to use eyeballed historical trends when you have good research backing up the association. Your conclusions, then, don’t rely on the simple trend comparison. The trends are an illustration.

But trends need not have have a simple cause-and-effect relationship — or a unidirectional relationship — for it to be important to compare them. Sometimes the relationship is just descriptively important. So, looking at the graph above, it would be reasonable to say, “Women’s lives sure have changed. They have fewer children and more jobs, on average, than they used to.”

And then there is the negative case. The other day I complained when Kay Hymowitz implied that the rise in father-absent families caused an increase in crime among boys. And I offered this simple trend comparison to undermine that story:

It was not my intention to say there is no connection between father absence and boys’ criminal behavior. (I’ve sketched out some possible links in this old post; and made essentially the same comparison about single mothers and crime before.) But the lack of a strong correlation in the trends over time is a challenge. That’s what I’ve been arguing about cell phones and traffic accidents:

Of course driving and texting is dangerous. And of course single parents have a harder time (on average) supervising and disciplining their children than married parents. But if there is a big discordance between the trends — texting and driving, single parents and crime — then that’s a problem for the story that one trend is driven by the other. Causal relationships may be apparent in a lab, or at the margins, but to explain large-scale social change is more difficult — and that’s often what we’re trying to do when we draw from specific research to make political, policy, or theoretical arguments.

So, it’s OK to use discordant trends to take potshots at a proposed causal story, to express skepticism. The discordant trends are a hurdle for the theory to overcome.

If you have good research showing that single parenthood, and especially father absence, is harming boys more than girls, then it would be to OK to use trends as an illustration. It just can’t be your main evidence. So Kay Hymowitz could reasonably include a graph like this to accompany her extensive review of the research on family structure and trouble for boys:

Yes, women’s advantage in high school and college completion has accompanied the trend toward father-absent living arrangements for young boys. That doesn’t fulfill her need to present more direct evidence, but it’s a piece of supporting evidence.

Conclusion: Juxtaposing historical trends is not how you prove a theory. It is a great tool for illustrating known associations, for describing social change, and for challenging theories or narratives.

Regnerus delivers deceptive dialogue to delighted devotees

Not rehashing the whole thing, just a brief field report.

Grainy hidden-camera footage of shadowy propagandist.

I happened to hear Mark Regnerus deliver a lecture yesterday, titled, “Children and Sociology under Fire: Conducting Research on Same-Sex Parenting.”

The talk was sponsored by something called the Pontifical Studies John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America, but you might know it as the Mark Regnerus fan club. In the talk, he presented his paper from last year (read all about it under the Regnerus tag) to a fawning audience of, let’s just say, mostly White Catholics.

I went to see how he would present it (very boringly), what he might say about the controversy (nothing substantive), and whether there would be any pushback (if anyone objected, they did so silently).

I came away with three observations about his presentation (these were all apparent in the paper — as Andrew Perrin, Neal Caren and I wrote — but seeing him present it showed how they work on a receptive audience).

First, he crudely manipulated his audience’s ignorance of research methods. He first described in some detail the “standard set of controls” he used to test the relationship between having a father or mother who ever (reportedly) had a same-sex romantic relationship and his many negative outcome variables. And then he proceeded to present bivariate relationships as if they were the results of those tests. He didn’t say they were adjusted, but everyone thought the results he showed were controlling for everything.

For example, to gasps from the crowd, he revealed that 17 percent of “intact bio family” kids had ever received welfare growing up, compared with 70 percent for those whose mother (reportedly) ever had a same-sex romantic relationship. If you don’t realize that this is mostly just a comparison between stable married-couple families and single-mother families, that might seem like a shockingly large effect.

Second, Regnerus pitched his audience the simplistic version of “reduced kinship” theory from the paper, in which people caring for children naturally care less about them if they are not biologically related. This was quite self-evident to the audience, so he didn’t dwell on it. Then he arranged his unadjusted means more or less from best to worst, left to right, from “intact bio” on the left, to adopted, widowed, divorced, separated, single-mother-divorced, single-mother-never-married, and finally “mother lesbian relationship” on the right.

“As you move left to right,” he explained with regard to one variable, “you see the challenges facing these young adults increase.” With another variable he said, “If you graph this, you sort of see a big surge as you get to reduced kinship.”

What you actually get as you move along that row, of course, is not reduced kinship (after all, adopted were just next to “intact bio” on the left side), but rather increasingly female-headed. But the writing on the slide was small, the groups were poorly defined, and the “reduced kinship” narrative was pertinent.

Finally, Regnerus made a few explicit statements about how his study was not intended to show causality (and insisted that he intended it to have no impact on public policy, that he only wrote a brief against marriage equality because he was sure other brief-writers would misrepresent the true science regarding same-sex parents). But he tipped his hand grotesquely, making an argument I don’t remember tucked away in the original paper.

As you might remember, in the results there are more negative outcomes for the children of “mother lesbian relationship” than for the “father gay relationship” children. This is logical since you’re talking about female-headed versus male-headed families. In the paper Regnerus wrote:

While I have so far noted several distinctions between IBFs and GFs—respondents who said their father had a gay relationship—there are simply fewer statistically-significant distinctions to note between IBFs and GFs than between IBFs and LMs, which may or may not be due in part to the smaller sample of respondents with gay fathers in the NFSS, and the much smaller likelihood of having lived with their gay father while he was in a same-sex relationship (emphasis added).

I don’t think I noticed that at the time. Or maybe I discounted it because of the “may or may not be due in part to” language. But now he’s quite a bit more sure. He told the Catholic audience:

There are fewer differences when we look at adult children of fathers who had a gay relationship. I don’t encourage you to read too much into this, except to say that there are fewer cases of them. Those for whom this was true were less likely, of course, to have lived with their father [and his partner]. Plenty of people did not live with their dads, so it would be not surprising to see they have fewer distinctions. Plenty of them did not live with this person.

It came up again in the Q&A, when David Crawford asked:

Q: “… adverse outcome that we’re finding also more centered in the lesbian mothers rather than the gay father relations. I also found that to be interesting. Is that a question of the children tending to spend more time with the mothers and being exposed to whatever causes…”

A [interrupting]: “That would be my best guess.”

So, although he would never dream of making causal claims, his “best guess” for why children living with their mothers rather than their fathers had tougher childhoods is because they spent more time with a lesbian in the household (a very small amount of time, compared to almost none for the children of suspected-gay dads). As Crawford put it, “being exposed to whatever causes…” Or, although he would never dream of making causal claims, his “best guess” for the pattern he sees is that one group was more exposed to the treatment effect he was ostensibly not testing.

As for the whole subject of the hostile reaction from academia, that just boiled down to a few moments of saying that social scientists are all liberals, that the truth can’t come out because real scientists are afraid to touch controversial subjects, and that he’s suffered unbearably as a result of his devotion to the truth. The applause was strident.

Anyway, I also discovered that attempting to sketch him gets harder the more times you try.

Teachers might help students finish high school

In Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond presents a story of world history in which the rise to power of some societies over others was driven by geographic and environmental dynamics.

Some of the stories involve simple chains of evidence like this: societies with more fertile territories settled down earlier and had greater population density, which led to more complex politics, including elites who controlled surpluses and then diverted resources to non-food producers such as artists, craftspeople and bureaucrats, resulting in the development of more advanced language and technology.

We rarely have such large-scale analyses of current social dynamics. One reason contemporary analyses is so much more complicated is because the variations involved are much more subtle and the time frames are much shorter. For example, trying to explain women’s market labor force participation rates that mostly vary between 70% and 85% across rich countries. Or looking at small, marginal effects that tell us something interesting without explaining what really drives the larger outcomes. For example, I found that 34% of mothers with girls named pink or purple as their favorite color, compared with 45% among those with boys — a subtle effect on a minor personality trait. Similarly, we learned recently that boys with sisters are more gender-traditional. But the effect is within a narrow range, and certainly smaller than other more fundamental determinants of gender attitudes.

As I listened to the audio version of Diamond’s book, I tried to imagine how he might describe some recent changes in the U.S., treating differences between states over recent decades as the outcome of such fundamental processes. Here’s one thing I think he might have said:

Those states that assigned greater numbers of people to the task of teaching children more rapidly produced populations with higher levels of education. In half a century, states tripled the number of teachers per student from about 5 per 100 to about 15 per hundred. As a result the percentage of young adults dropping out of high school fell by about half, from near 60% to about 30%.

Here is my figure, plotting teachers per student (age 6-14) against dropout rates (age 16-24) 10 years later:

Source: My analysis of Census data from IPUMS.org.

Is that a fair characterization of the history? Or does it overwrite fundamental variation or complexity and lead to the wrong story?

I want more simple stories, and I would also like them to be true.

Fundamentally opposed to science?

Conservative religious fundamentalists really don’t trust the scientific establishment.

In the discussion of academia’s liberalism, we should also consider the public’s mistrust of science, especially the conservative and fundamentalist public. Why would people who don’t trust science become scientists?

Last year Gordon Gauchat reported in American Sociological Review that Americans’ trust in the scientific community was holding steady except for political conservatives and those who attend church regularly, and that the trend was not explained by the lower education levels of conservatives or religious people (in fact, educated conservatives expressed the lowest levels of trust in science). His conclusion was that the trend showed the politicization of science, which is not the way modernity is supposed to go.

In response, Darren Sherkat blogged that Gauchat underestimated the importance of religion in explaining conservatives’ opposition to science because he only used the General Social Survey’s measure of the frequency of religious attendance instead of a measure of beliefs. And he provided a chart from the GSS showing that religious fundamentalists had lower trust in science whether they were Republicans or not. Sherkat wrote:

Any social scientist who studies politics, religion, and science should know that the reason why Republicans are at war against science is to court the vote of fundamentalist Christian simpletons who are opposed to science and reason. … What drives Republican opposition to science is that more Republicans are fundamentalists who believe that the Bible is the literal word of god.

You got your fundamentalism in my conservatism

As I look at it, conservatism and fundamentalism are both at fault. My take on the trends shows that, in addition to the growing divide between politically conservative fundamentalists and politically liberal non-fundamentalists, liberal fundamentalists have grown more trusting of science, while conservative non-fundamentalists have grown less trusting.

I used the GSS from 1974 through the latest 2012 survey. To highlight the polarization I show only those who are “extremely liberal,” “liberal,” “conservative,” or “extremely conservative,” leaving out those who are “slightly” liberal or conservative, or moderate. So this is not the whole population (I’ll return to that below).

The question was:

I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them? … Scientific community.

It’s as close as we get to a question about science itself. For fundamentalism, GSS asked whether the respondent’s religion was fundamentalist, moderate, or liberal. I dichotomized it to fundamentalists versus everyone else (including people with no religion).*

These are the people expressing a great deal of confidence in the scientific community:

These trends are heavily smoothed (down to four decades), because the numbers bounce around a lot from year to year, as the samples are only between 60 and 220 in each cell in the individual years. To do a simple test of the trends, I ran a regression using time and interactions between time and politics-fundamentlism dummy variables, with controls for age and sex (old people and men hate science more than regular people, net of religion and politics).

The regression confirms what the graph shows: significant declines in trust among conservatives whether fundamentalist or not, and an increase in trust among liberal fundamentalists. The trend for liberal non-fundamentalists was flat. (Details on request.)

I left out of that analysis the people who were slightly conservative, moderate, or slightly liberal. That’s a shrinking majority of the population, which breaks down like this from the 1970s to the last decade (click to enlarge):

So the bad news for science is that the increasingly anti-science groups are increasing in the population: conservative fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. The big green majority is not growing more or less anti-science (even when you break it down by fundamentalism), but it’s also shrinking. The liberal fundamentalists are getting more into science, but also vanishing.

Just wait till they find out (some) sociology is part of the “scientific community.”

Note: This is a blog-post, not peer-reviewed research. I might be wrong.

* Skerkat instead uses a question about how to interpret the Bible instead of the fundamentalism question (literal word of God, inspired word of God, book of fables). 95% of the people who described themselves as having a “fundamentalist” describe the Bible as either the literal or the inspired word of God.

 

 

Responses on fatherhood: hormones, science and god

The fatherhood post yesterday has gotten (for this blog), a lot of readers and some interesting responses. As I wrote out some extended, disorganized comment responses, I realized I may as well elevate them to an independent post (still a disorganized rant though).

I like the discussion by the authors on the Scientific American blog suggested by szopeno. Like I said in the original post, it’s quite reasonable that caring behavior affects hormone levels, as we know things like stress and fear do as well, with all kinds of mental and physical effects. If you randomly subjected some people to competitive athletic coaching, and handed others an infant, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the competition people behaving more aggressively and the baby-holders being more nurturing on average three months later. That would be interesting.

What is the implication? Are we shocked that some aspects of fatherhood (or childcare or sex) provoke a “biological” response? If that shocks you, you might like to know that by simply showing people pictures of other people behaving in certain ways, their bodies are are more likely to undergo spontaneous physical transformations. Just from sitting there looking at pictures! Also, if you inject an athlete with testosterone he can ride his bike really fast.

It does not follow from these findings of a hormonal response to life events that we should promote certain family arrangements as “natural,” which is where Wilcox and the religious-sociological-complex is taking this. If the goal is to change men’s testosterone levels, that might be done with medication. If the goal is to reduce aggressiveness, try teaching meditation in public schools. If we want people to be better parents, we can give them jobs, healthcare, housing and childcare support.

We have lots of ways of trying to promote happiness and pro-social behavior. However, like the crazy list of potential risks and side effects for men taking low-T medication, there are consequences to any such intervention.

Fortunately for individual freedom and human rights, some of us know that we can punish or prevent bad behavior — and reward or encourage good behavior — without attacking or rewarding whole status categories of people. Children with rich, married, college-educated parents are more likely to get into and finish college. So, we ought to fund a public school system, fund student loans for college — and also protect the children of the evil, sick or ineffective rich, married, college-educated parents from harm. But that doesn’t mean we should sterilize poor people.

So, is fatherhood good?

It’s not a question with one answer. One of the things Wilcox and the family “gold standard” promoters do is find ways that people in “traditional” families are doing better on average and use that to promote family conformity. But the averages conceal the sources of variation. Comparing the average father to the average non-father won’t tell you much about how fatherhood affects men because fatherhood occurs along with so many combinations of other transitions, experiences and resources. If you randomly assigned fatherhood to random men — at random moments in their lives — you could come up with an answer. Otherwise I’m not optimistic, and if it’s not answerable I doubt it’s a good question for social science.

Imagine three sets of outcomes: money, happiness and healthiness. Each is affected by social background and context. Then consider men entering fatherhood with different levels of each beforehand, and see how each outcome changes for all the different combinations (e.g., income changes for rich, happy, healthy; income changes for poor, happy, healthy; etc.). The possibilities multiply. If you’re Brad Wilcox you can work back from your goal — married nuclear families — and compare them to everyone else to cherry-pick any worse outcome at any time, and lo, discover that the Bible was right after all. If you really want to know it’s not so easy.

I haven’t yet read Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, the new book by Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson, but that seems promising for an in-depth look at fatherhood in the flow of men’s lives, with a lot of attention to the social context (education, employment, incarceration, complex families and relationships, etc.).

Don’t take my Word for it

If you start from a God-given definition of what’s good, and science can’t change that, then science becomes just a convenient way of explaining what you already knew, which is not science — it’s what the Church calls “natural law.”

Wilcox denies that’s how it works, naturally. At a conference on the family and natural law, he was quoted as saying,

Our support for the renewal of marriage is not predicated on some … religious worldview. Rather, it’s based on a reasonable understanding of the human condition that is accessible to all men and women of good will. … Evidence suggests to us that intact, biological marriage is still the gold standard.

That depends on what you mean by “predicated.” Years before the “Regnerus affair,” during which Mark Regnerus joined Wilcox in a scheme to use science against marriage equality in the courts, Regnerus gave his view of the importance of (a certain kind of) marriage, and it did not originate from his scientific training:

The importance of Christian marriage as a symbol of God’s covenantal faithfulness to his people—and a witness to the future union of Christ and his bride—will only grow in significance as the wider Western culture diminishes both the meaning and actual practice of marriage. Marriage itself will become a witness to the gospel.

That divine law and natural law do not conflict is an article of faith (literally). I think Pope Leo XIII put it well when he wrote:

Now, reason itself clearly teaches that the truths of divine revelation and those of nature cannot really be opposed to one another, and that whatever is at variance with them must necessarily be false. Therefore, the divine teaching of the Church, so far from being an obstacle to the pursuit of learning and the progress of science, or in any way retarding the advance of civilization, in reality brings to them the sure guidance of shining light.

Thus, rather than see science as a candle in the dark, natural law says that science needs a candle in the dark, and God has one. Could any research penetrate that mindset? If your research contradicts the “truths of divine revelation” then your research is wrong. Try again! Science in this vein is just looking for ways to convince secular society that the Church is already right. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy (literally). From the same natural law conference news report:

While there’s limited data on the effects of same-sex marriage on children, Wilcox hypothesized that in a few years, research will show that children in lesbian or gay family situations will exhibit some of the same problems as children from father-less or cohabiting relationships.

That conference was in January 2011. At that point Wilcox already had the New Family Structure Study machinery in motion, which would end up confirming to the faithful what they already knew.

What is the logic of marriage denial?

And this should wrap up Homogamy Week here at Family Inequality…

I am confused by the logic in the arguments against extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples.

I earlier pointed to an essay I agree with, arguing that denying marriage rights on the basis of a child well-being argument is wrong-headed. And that’s even before we got the excellent review from the American Sociological Association reaffirming that homogamous-couples cause no demonstrable harm to children.

But now on the other side, Mark Regnerus and his colleagues have submitted a stunning brief for the Supreme Court’s upcoming marriage-rights cases. In it they argue that man-woman parents are best for children, but also that there are too many unanswered questions to draw any firm conclusions about child well-being in gay- and lesbian-parent families — so therefore the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 should be upheld.

Back up

When Regnerus’s awful study came out — purporting to show (but not actually showing) that children of gay and lesbian parents were worse off then those in “intact biological families” — he disavowed any political intent or implications. When he interviewed himself, it went like this:

Q: Is there a political take-home message in the study?

A: No. As I stated in the article, “this study cannot answer political questions about same-sex relationships…”

Q: Come on. You can’t surmise what people will make of this study politically?

A: You know, I don’t think it easily lends itself to one particular answer to any of the politicized questions that are circulating about gay marriage, or parental rights, etc.

And when he wrote in Slate, he offered an ostensibly even-handed interpretation:

The political take-home message of the NFSS study is unclear, however. On the one hand, the instability detected in the NFSS could translate into a call for extending the relative security afforded by marriage to gay and lesbian couples. On the other hand, it may suggest that the household instability that the NFSS reveals is just too common among same-sex couples to take the social gamble of spending significant political and economic capital to esteem and support this new (but tiny) family form while Americans continue to flee the stable, two-parent biological married model, the far more common and accomplished workhorse of the American household, and still—according to the data, at least—the safest place for a kid.

In fact, Regnerus and his defenders were incensed that he was being treated as if his motives were political. And in his own defense he wrote of the original paper: “Some perceive it as a tool for this or that political project, a role it was never designed to fill. It cannot answer political or legal questions…”

That was then. So now to the amicus brief filed by Regnerus and several other social scientists. Their review of the evidence is irrelevant to their argument, because they conclude that we don’t know enough to draw any empirical conclusions. Still,

With so many significant outstanding questions about whether children develop as well in same-sex households as in opposite-sex households, it remains prudent for government to continue to recognize marriage as a union of a man and a woman, thereby promoting what is known to be an ideal environment for raising children. Marriage is the legal means by which children are stably united with their biological mothers and fathers and poised for optimal development. Opposite-sex parenting allows children to benefit from distinctive maternal and paternal contributions. Given these facts, safeguarding marriage is a liberty to be accorded to children at least as much as to their parents.

So man-woman parenting is good, OK. And we don’t know enough to say anything about gay and lesbian parenting causally. Therefore it is “prudent” to deny marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples, because “safeguarding marriage is a liberty to be accorded to children.”

That is, it was right to tax Edith Windsor $600,000 more because her spouse was female. For the children.

Edith Windsor

I really hope Regnerus gets a chance to testify as an expert on all this someday, because I’d love to hear more about this logic under cross examination.