Category Archives: Chapter 3
Mathematics or “Citizen Statistics”?
Does learning mathematics help to master the statistics necessary to understand the social world we live in? Political scientist Andrew Hacker thinks this is a “math myth” that has led to requirements at the high school level that turns off … Continue reading
Fighting Extreme Poverty
Half a billion people live on less than 75 cents per day. Termed the “ultrapoor,” they often have too few resources to send their children to school or to save any money. What would it take to improve their conditions? … Continue reading
Getting Going to Fight Poverty
Imagine that you are managing a health clinic and need to recruit health workers who not just know their stuff, but are genuinely interested in helping the community. Would you include in your ad the statement, “Job provides great opportunity … Continue reading
Political Polling: Still Viable?
Polling has captured the news as never before during the current presidential primary season. But at the same time that polls are more popular than ever before, their reliability is lower than ever. As you know from Chapter 8 on … Continue reading
The Significance of Touch
We live in a language-centered culture and so it is no surprise that the methods we use to investigate our social relations focus largely on language. From survey methods to life histories, from content analysis to conversation analysis, we seek … Continue reading
Would You Want Your Parents to Know?
A new experiment at Harvard’s Student Social Support R&D Lab indicates that students in a summer program did better when their parents received a weekly one-sentence about their children’s performance. The study used a randomize experimental design with students in … Continue reading
Paying for the privilege of participating in a medical experiment?
Medical research may identify a potentially valuable treatment that must be tested in a rigorous experiment. Usually such experiments are funded by federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, after a careful review, or by the company that has … Continue reading
Psychics and Pseudoscience
With concerns about reproducibility of results and exposure of instances of fraud–not to mention conflicting research results about what you should eat and how often you should be tested, it is easy to become cynical about the value of scientific … Continue reading
Photos as Data
Do you store your photos on Google Photos? Do you know that Google doesn’t just store, it also analyzes? It scans pictures to identify such features as what you are wearing, what you are doing, and whether you are with … Continue reading
A Mad Rush to Publish
There’s nothing worse for the progress of science than finding that published results were based on outright fraud or overhyped findings. The editors of a site termed Retraction Watch estimate that an average retraction rate of one scientific paper per … Continue reading
Researching in a Social World 