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Category Archives: Chapter 16
Reproducibility? Not So Much.
When social scientists use exemplary methods and report their findings accurately, we like to think that they have found out something about the social world. Furthermore, it then seems that if another social scientist conducted the same study again, with … Continue reading
Posted in Chapter 1, Chapter 16, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 7
Tagged Experimental Design, Quantitative Data Analysis, Reporting, Research Ethics, Sampling
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Place matters for poverty
Children who move out of high poverty neighborhoods to low poverty neighborhoods with more resources do better on multiple outcomes, and the younger they are when their families move the better. These conclusions come from a study of the long-term outcomes … Continue reading
Posted in Chapter 16, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 9
Tagged Census, Evaluation Research, Experimental Design, Graphs, Health Care, Poverty, Quantitative Data Analysis, Reporting
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Do social scientists do better than pollsters?
One of the concerns that emerged from the recent scandal about apparently fictitious data in a published poll about support for same-sex marriage was whether public pollsters are less transparent in their methods than social scientists. Polling organizations are often … Continue reading
Posted in Chapter 16, Chapter 3, Chapter 7, Chapter 8
Tagged Experimental Design, Reporting, Research Ethics, Survey Research
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Increasing retractions, increasing fraud??
There has been a 20-25 percent increase in retractions in a total of 10,000 medical and science journals in the past five years (it’s now up to 500-600 retractions per year). Data has been distorted, faked, and the methods of getting … Continue reading
Posted in Chapter 16, Chapter 3
Tagged Internet and Society, Reporting, Research Ethics
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Research Findings Too Good to be True
The level of popular acceptance of same-sex marriage has increased dramatically in recent years, but remains low in many areas. What if same-sex marriage proponents sent gay canvassers into neighborhoods to persuade opponents of gay marriage to change their potential … Continue reading
Who We Are and Who We Are Becoming
As a long-term resident of the Boston area and a college professor, it’s heartening to learn that Bostonians spend more on college than residents of others cities. As I write yet another blog entry based on a newspaper article, it’s … Continue reading
More Money, More Marriage
Back in the 1970s, when I married, it seemed that everyone was getting divorced. Articles by social scientists and others were full of prognostications about the end of marriage as an institution. But a recent New York Times article by Johns … Continue reading
