How Low Can It Go?

Posted on January 27, 2015 by russellschutt

Field researchers like to talk about the joys of “getting your hands dirty” by immersing yourself in the ongoing social life of a community.  But I’ll bet many researchers would balk at climbing down into sewers to collect their data!

That’s what a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will do when they sample Cambridge sewage water repeatedly between 2015 and 2017, and then in Kuwait City starting in 2017.

Why sewage water, you ask?  It provides unobtrusive data on viruses, bacteria, pollutants and drugs.  How does that measurement strategy strike you?  What problems do you envision? Do you foresee any ethical concerns?

Read more about this ambitious new study in the Boston Globe at https://secure.pqarchiver.com/boston-sub/doc/1644330923.html?FMT=FT&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jan+11%2C+2015&author=Fitzgerald%2C+Michael&pub=Boston+Globe&edition=&startpage=&desc=What+sewage+knows+about+you.

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Rigorous Evidence Should Inform Spending

Posted on January 27, 2015 by russellschutt

Ron Haskins began the new year on a positive note.  The co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, Haskins reports that “a growing body of evidence shows that a few model social programs” work, and that “the Obama administration, building on work by the Bush administration, has insisted that money for evidence-based initiatives go primarily to programs with rigorous evidence of success as measured by scientifically designed evaluation.”

Haskins should know:  he was a policy analyst who helped House Republicans design the 1996 welfare overhaul, he advised President George W. Bush on social policy, and he is supporting the Obama administrations evidence-based initiative.

Successful evidence-based programs include a Teen Outreach Program in Florida, a Reading Partners program in a number of low-income communities, a Nurse-Family Partnership Program in Pennsylvania, and a comprehensive school reform program known as Success for All.

In “Social Programs That Work,” Haskins also argues that randomized experiments are necessary to determine “what works.” You can read his argument at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/what-people-buy-where.html?_r=0.

Does this article convince you of the value of randomized experiments? What about after you read chapter 7 in Investigating, on Experimental Design?  What other ways does Chapter 12, Evaluation and Policy Research, suggest for studying social programs?  Is it ethical to cut funding for programs that don’t seem to work after a rigorous evaluation?  To fund programs that do not work when we know that others do?

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Who We Are and Who We Are Becoming

Posted on January 27, 2015 by russellschutt

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 also no surprise to learn that Bostonians spend 40% more than the national average on newspapers and magazines.  On the other hand, I feel a bit miffed to learn that Seattle residents are the nation’s leaders in book purchasing (68% above average).

If those figures seem reasonable to you, what do you make of the finding that New York city residents spend 597% more than the national average on watches, while expenditures on women’s dresses are 290% above average in Phoenix?  Not to mention spending on dating services is 261% above average in Detroit.

University of Southern California Professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey to identify differences among cities in household spending between 2007 and 2012.  She argues that “the geography of conspicuous consumption shows us who we are and who we are becoming”–that spending patterns may indicate cultural, political, and social differences. But Professor Currid-Halkett also points out that people may self-select into certain cities based on their spending patterns or that cities may shape residents’ spending patterns.  Either way, the result may be increasing differences between cities.

Do you think that such spending differences indicate cultural orientations?  Do you think they are more likely due to selection effects–like attracts like–or internal pressures for conformity to local norms? How could you conduct an analysis like this using “Big Data” on spending patterns rather than survey data?

You can read more about this study in a New York Times article at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/what-people-buy-where.html?_r=0.  Be sure to check out the graph for your city.  How did Professor Currid-Halkett take account of differences in city population?  How did she consider income differences?

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Health Care Myths and Randomized Trials

Posted on January 19, 2015 by russellschutt

Once people have health insurance, they are going to be less likely to go to the emergency room for acute health problems and will instead see doctors in their offices and use more preventive care services. Right? Well, it seems logical and there are many supporting anecdotes, but a large randomized trial of Medicaid eligibility in Oregon found that this logic is wrong: After people received Medicaid, they used the emergency room more than they did before.

The value of randomized trials is that they allow comparison of some outcome for one group that receives a treatment to the outcome for another group that doesn’t receive that treatment but otherwise is similar to the treated (“experimental”) group.

Are you convinced? Read chapter 7 on experimental design before you decide that you’ll just go with your gut feelings. And be sure to read “Health Care Myths” in the New York Times:

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The Person Particle?

Posted on January 19, 2015 by russellschutt

We all value our individuality, so it might be disconcerting to know that in new research about crowd behavior, some physicists have improved understanding of human behavior by thinking of people as particles.  Using cameras and analyses of big data sets containing the resulting visual data, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and computer scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that they could describe “the underlying dynamic present in every kind of crowd situation, be it a jumble of fans exiting a stadium or a loose constellation of pedestrians strolling through the park.”  These “different kinds of flows follow this same kind of energy law.” They suggest several practical applications of this finding.

Does this research make sense to you?  Can you imagine that people in crowds have predictable patterns of behavior in relation to each other?  Are you interested in pursuing such research as visual data from public places becomes more common?  If so, see the section in Chapter 11 on Visual Sociology.  How does this approach compare to other uses of “big data” described in chapter 14 of Investigating the Social World? 

Read more about it at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-richer-people-marry.html

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More Money, More Marriage

Posted on January 19, 2015 by russellschutt

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 Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin makes it clear that it has not turned out this way.  In a graphic picture that is “worth a thousand words,” Cherlin displays a pattern that many social scientists are now familiar with: Rates of marriage are high and rates of divorce low among white-collar professionals and others with more education, but marriage rates are still low and divorce rates are high among blue-collar and service workers.

Do you think the security provided by more income is the reason for the discrepancy, or might other factors be involved?  Professor Cherlin provides some other explanations, including a link to levels of inequality.  You can read more at:

Can you imagine other ways to graph the changes and differences?  What additional questions are raised by the summary graph in the article?

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The Census in Afghanistan

Posted on January 19, 2015 by russellschutt

Conducting a census is a challenge for any government, but imagine how those challenges are multiplied as the current government in Afghanistan makes a new effort to conduct a national census. It’s not just the continued threat of violence in some areas: “Many people lack surnames, most do not know their birthday, and Afghan women generally will not speak if their husbands are out.”

The census director expects it to take five years to reach 70 percent of the population. You can read more about this effort in a New York Times article at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/world/asia/for-afghans-name-and-birthdate-census-questions-are-not-so-simple.html.

How do these cultural problems compare to the physical problems encountered in the earlier Afghan census effort described on page 156 of Investigating the Social World? What about the problems in the Russian and Iraqi census efforts discussed on the same page? Based on the details provided in the sampling chapter on the U.S. Census effort, to what extent do you think the U.S. government has overcome these problems?

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Research That Matters, Testing That Counts

Posted on December 3, 2014 by russellschutt

How many students would vote to have more tests in their classes?  It’s hard to imagine that adding more tests would increase instructor popularity, but new research indicates that when testing is done in the right way, it can increase knowledge and be easy to swallow.  When students take frequent small quizzes at the start of class, encounter mixed tests (that draw on diverse skills), and just discuss class material in a study group, their mastery improves more than when they just take one or two large standardized tests.  Findings from this research are summarized in a recent New York Times article by Benedict Carey.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/sunday-review/studying-for-the-test-by-taking-it.html?_r=0

The 8th edition of Investigating the Social World encourages this active learning approach.  Research That Matters, Questions That Count vignettes that begin each chapter encourage a dialogue about key topics that can continue as they read the chapter.  The Research in the News vignettes within each chapter include questions that relate a contemporary social issue to methods in the chapter.  There are many more testing tools in the end-of-chapter material and on the student study site.  As Carey explains, information that is “embedded in a host of additional associations and connections” will be “much easier to recall.”  Try it; they just might like it!

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Secret photographing of classes at Harvard??

Posted on November 8, 2014 by russellschutt

Maybe you missed it, but it has been big news in the Boston area:  classes were secretly photographed in spring 2014 as part of a Harvard University research project about classroom attendance. About 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls were included in the photos, although the images were destroyed after they were scanned by a computer program that counted the number of full and empty seats.

Harvard’s Institutional Review Board had classified the study as not involving research on human subjects–perhaps because it focused on classroom teaching (given special exemption in federal regulations) and did not retain images of individuals–but that didn’t stop an outcry from many students and faculty after the study was revealed in a conference presentation.

Was this an invasion of privacy?  Should the instructors and students have been informed in advance?  Would the results have differed if there had been disclosure in advance?  What policy would you recommend?  What do classmates think?  You can read more about the study at the Boston Globe website, http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/05/harvard-secretly-photographed-students-study-class-attendance-raising-privacy-concerns/hC8TBdGdZmQehg0lAhnnJN/story.html.

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The joys of electronic media

Posted on November 7, 2014 by russellschutt

With all due respect to the research that suggests reading on paper results in better understanding and learning…, it’s hard to resist the appeal of a well-constructed e-book.  Consider chapter 1 of Investigating the Social World:  It’s an introduction to the appeal and logic of social research, with examples from research about the internet and social relations.  So why not learn by doing?

You can start the chapter by discussing the Research That Matters vignette on research about Wi-Fi use and then linking out to the complete article.  Many questions about social research methods will arise with an overview of that article and the process of questioning–and discussing the questions–will help to establish an active learning spirit for the course.  An audio link on p. 5 about social media provides a way to stay focused on social research while walking to class (but watch your step!).

Throughout the chapter, more links to journal articles, videos, audio segments, interviews with researchers, and encyclopedia entries help to reinforce key concepts and enrich understanding.  On p. 17, there is a link to interactive exercises that will help understanding of the different types of research. Different strokes for different folks!

With the e-book version, it’s as easy as point-and-click!

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