Back in 2007, I blogged about the many misperceptions about suicide. Many assumptions surround suicide, specifically the notion that suicide is a much bigger problem now than in the past and one that disproportionally affects young people. Both of these assumptions are incorrect.
By Sally Raskoff
In the sciences, we use theory and methods to empirically assess “reality”. While we can often play with data to explore the relationships between our concepts(our variables), it is important to frame what we’re doing with good theory.
An interesting graph has made its rounds through social media lately. It shows a strong relationship between Internet Explorer market share and murders in the U.S.
Continue reading "Thinking Critically About Statistics and Their Sources" »
From day one in my statistics course, I tell my students that data are everywhere. Even though the word makes it sound like data is everywhere, the word data is plural thus they are everywhere.
Facebook helped me make the point recently when they posted a note and shared information gleaned from posting patterns (empirical data!) during the week that the Supreme Court heard arguments on marriage equality.
What if I told you that if you thought you were normal, you might just be weird?
Some friends of mine have a ten-year-old, and I pulled a book off their shelf to read it aloud. The title asks, Are You Normal? It’s a fun book, published by National Geographic and by Mark Shulman, intended to educate kids on how their favorite foods and activities compared with other kids’ tastes, activities, and home life. If you like your peanut butter chunky, for example, it means you are only like 25% of the population. If you are an only child, you might not be normal because only one in seven don’t have a brother or sister. And so on.
Robin (not her real name) is a student of mine who came to my office to discuss her research paper for my class, due two weeks from the day she came to see me. She is very excited about her topic, which she selected for the assignment. She would like to study how poverty impacts education.
This is a big question, and an important one at that. But it is too big to explore in any sort of depth, especially within two weeks. Scholars can spend their entire careers researching questions like these; the first step to being able to conduct your own research—especially for the first time and within a tight time frame—is to narrow your focus.
The journal Social Forces has published many classic studies in sociology in its ninety year history. To celebrate,the publisher has offered free public access. Even better, each of these articles has updates or reflection articles from the original authors.
While new research is always being pursued, it is important to realize that classic work still has an important contribution to make – that’s why you end up reading so much of it in sociology classes. On the other hand, it is important not to just accept the older work as consistently applicable but to reflect, reassess, reapply the findings to see if they retain their power of explanation. If the findings are no longer as relevant, we can learn about how life has changed or what the research might have missed, created as it is rooted in a particular time and place.
I’m one of those people who still reads the print newspaper. Actually, I read three of them, and am periodically aware of how they present the same news story in such different ways. Sometimes it takes looking at a variety of different sources to see how the presentation of a new research study can be misleading thanks to word choice or conclusions that the reporter draws that the study itself actually does not make.
For instance, when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) they had some fascinating findings on abortion rate trends.
The CDC noted that “Compared with 2008, the total number and rate of reported abortions for 2009 decreased 5 percent, representing the largest single year decrease for the entire period of analysis,” and … “From 2000 to 2009, the total number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 6 percent, 7 percent, and 8 percent, respectively, to the lowest levels for 2000–2009.”
By Tanya
Erzen
Tanya Erzen is an associate professor of comparative religious studies at Ohio State University and visiting scholar at University of Washington.
A teenage fan of the Twilight series explains that she thinks Edward Cullen, the brooding and gorgeous vampire hero, is controlling, creepy and even violent in his relationship with Bella, an ordinary human high school girl with whom he is passionately in love. While the fan criticizes Bella and Edward’s tumultuous relationship, she is simultaneously wearing a button on her jacket with the text, “Edward can bust my headboard, bite my pillow and bruise my body any day.” This refers to the part of the story when Bella awakes with her entire body black and blue after losing her virginity on her honeymoon. In the aftermath, there are feathers from the pillow Edward has bitten drifting around the room, and the bed is shattered into pieces.
By Sally Raskoff
Did you see the news about the relationship between chocolate and Nobel Prizes? Dr. Franz Messerli reported in a New England Journal of Medicine article that a country’s chocolate consumption is positively and statistically significantly associated with their rate of winning the Nobel Prize. If a country has high chocolate consumption, they are also likely to have many winners of the Nobel Prize.
By Sally Raskoff
Every now and then new technology will change something that humans do in very radical ways. We've been collecting information from people scientifically with surveys, interviews, and observations by using paper and pen, then computers, and now, potentially, mobile apps.
Recently a new phone app, the Kinsey Reporter was introduced that collects data from users on sexual behavior. Just a few hours later it was pulled from the marketplace by the university that houses the Kinsey Institute, developer of the app.
Alfred Kinsey revolutionized the scientific study of sexual behavior, and the Kinsey Institute has continued generating much research that helps us better understand human sexuality. However, the issue of collecting good quality data on sexual behavior continues to be a challenge.
Enter mobile apps, which allow those who are interested to download the app and proceed to enter incidents and opinions about their sexual experiences.
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