It's a sad statement on the state of statistical literacy in this world when no one seems to recognize a useless study for what it is:
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals...
The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right...[Researcher] Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold...
So, in other words, Block can give no reason why he feels these results would generalize to the population, meaning every line in this article suggesting that these results do generalize is completely, utterly wrong. I'm not surprise the reporter doesn't realize this. I'm astonished that Block doesn't seem to realize it - else, why would he make such a dumb statement? Of course the results hold within the sample, that's...the sample he used. In the world of research, that's wholly beside the point.
Block's statement reminds me of a particular kind of student in the statistics classes that I've taught - the ones who understood the segments on descriptive statistics, sort of, but hit a brick wall when it came to inferential statistics. They could crunch numbers on a dataset, but never could grasp the concept that we sample data for the purpose of generalizing to the population, and that the representativeness of the sample directly effects the extent to which the results can be generalized.
Instead of failing these students outright, I always took them aside to have a chat - the empathetic, caring, Perhaps A Major That Requires A Course In Statistics Is Not For You talk. They always got the message and dropped the course. Block is obviously made of sterner stuff and persevered despite his utter lack of statistical knowledge. Nice.
(Ace is but one of the whiny conservatives having fun with this article.)
Posted by kswygert at March 22, 2006 06:11 PM