Education researchers have noted the durability and persistence of socioeconomic inequalities in educational outcomes, a situation that has alternatively been called “Maximally Maintained Inequality” or “Effectively Maintained Inequality“. Four years ago, my collaborator Jennifer C. Lee at Indiana University and myself were wrapping up an article on college enrollments and she brought to my attention …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
COVID and loss of taste
This morning I woke up with a pretty strong sore throat. I took some throat lozenges and while it is is not necessarily sore, I have a strange sensation in my throat and my sense of taste is a bit impaired. My girlfriend and I had plans for tonight, so I texted her explaining that …
Physical fitness and police shootings
In a discussion on the cowardice exhibited by the Uvalde police (school district or otherwise), Twitter user Frizzy Missy points to widespread lack of fitness among police, citing this article (PDF) appearing on “Gilmore Health News” which I have never heard of. This article, headlined “Police Recruitment Poor Standards: Physically Unfit Cops Are More Likely …
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 …
The Quantitative Literacy Gap in Sociology Undergraduate Education
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 “The Quantitative Literacy Gap in Sociology Undergraduate Education”
About that youth responses to COVID study…
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 “About that youth responses to COVID study…”
That fat politician study
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 …
Youth Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic
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 …
COVID testing data addendum
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. …
COVID testing data
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 …