Thomas Linneman wrote an article appearing earlier this year in Teaching Sociology that documents a continual upgrading in the statistical methods used in sociology articles. He asks the reader to ponder whether or not sociological statistics courses are preparing undergraduate students to read most published sociological quantitative investigations (they are not) and for statistics instructors … Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I wrote skeptically about a CDC study by Mark Czeisler et al. reporting very high rates of mental health issues among young people in 2020 due to COVID. I wrote: If it was me doing the study, I would have minimized mention of COVID-19 and tried to mimic questions about … Continue reading
Today my twitter feed had people commenting on Pavlo Blavatskyy’s study correlating the body-mass index of post-Soviety politicians with country corruption measures. This is a fortuitous coincidence as this is one of the few studies which I can use to illutrate the importance of paying attention to the unit of analysis. So Blavatskyy used machine … Continue reading
I was a bit skeptical of this statistic when I saw it; a quarter of young people having such strong, adverse reactions to the pandemic seemed a bit incredible to me. I looked up the study and sure enough Wellmon is accurately portraying the findings, although I am still a bit skeptical. First, this … Continue reading
In my last post, I expressed some dissatisfaction with attempted take-downs of Donald Trump’s assertion that increased COVID cases are just an artifact of testing. While looking over the COVID Tracking Project I found this nice visualization: I think this does a better job of putting to rest Trump’s excuse for a greater COVID cases. … Continue reading
Donald Trump’s disastrous interview with Jonathan Swan centered around COVID testing data which I want to take up here and just organize my thoughts on the subject. I am looking for a good overview of COVID case data and where its potential biases are and I am a bit flummoxed. As best as I can … Continue reading
Back in February, New York Times writer Clair Cain Miller wrote a piece about recent research on the gendered division of labor among heterosexual partners. Part of her article discussed the study by sociologists Brittany Dernberger and Joanna Pepin, who used Monitoring the Future data to track 12th-graders’ attitudes towards division of labor arrangements from 1976 … Continue reading
Fabio Rojas has argued for most institutions reopening in the face of COVID-19, on the grounds that COVID mortality rates are quite low for the non-elderly. A number of commenters on his posted legitimately raised the issue of people with serious, long-lasting complications from COVID. It’s just not a matter of a few people dying … Continue reading
In Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best argues that consumers of statistics need to especially scrutinize international comparisons because there are so many opportunities to mix up apples and oranges (I have discussed this with regard to the conceptual definitions used to quantify police-related deaths in different countries). One of Best’s examples was international comparisons … Continue reading
Twin Designs and Cultural Capital
I am late to this party, but in 2017 sociologists Mads Meier Jæger and Stine Møllegaard published a study using a monozygotic twin design to study the effects of cultural capital, a concept in education research capturing familiarity with the dominant culture. Other sociologists [1,2] have made convincing claims that cultural capital matters for academic … Continue reading →