Methodological Trees and Forests

December 12, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

The units of analysis that researchers choose usually constrain the explanations they come up with. Measuring variables on individuals makes it harder to see the effects of larger units like neighborhoods.

For example, much research has found a correlation between female-headed households and crime. Most explanations for this correlation focus on the households, with much talk about the lack of role models or the quality of parent-child interaction. But these explanations are looking at individual trees and ignoring the forest. The better question is not “What are the effects of growing up in a single-parent home?” It’s “What are the effects of growing up in a neighborhood where half the households are headed by single mothers?”

In the early 1990s, I wrote a criminology textbook, and one of the things that differentiated it from others was that it took seriously the idea of neighborhoods and neighborhood-level variables.

That was then. But now, Christina Cross in a recent Times op-ed makes a similar argument. Research generally shows that it’s better for kids to grow up with two parents rather than one. That fits with our assumptions about “broken homes” even if we now call them “single-parent households.” But Cross’s research finds a crucial Black-White difference in the importance of this one dimension of family structure.

Looking at educational outcomes, she finds that White kids from two-parent families do much better than their single-parent counterparts. But for Black kids, the advantage of a two-parent home is not so great.

living in a single-mother family does not decrease the chances of on-time high school completion as significantly for black youths as for white youths. Conversely, living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers.

 Why does a two-parent family have less impact among Blacks? Cross looks at two explanations. The first is that the effect of a very low-income neighborhood (“socioeconomically stressful environments”) is so great that it washes out most of the effect of the number of parents inside the home. For a kid growing up in an area with a high concentration of poverty, having a father at home might make a difference, but that difference will be relatively small, especially if the father is unemployed or working for poverty-level wages.

The other explanation is that having other relatives close by mitigates the impact of having only one parent in the home. Cross says that her data supports this idea, but the extend-family network explanation is not nearly as powerful as the neighborhood-poverty explanation.

For policy-makers, what all this means is that the traditional conservative, individual-based solutions miss the point. Exhorting people to stay married (and providing costly government programs along the same lines) aren’t going to have much impact as long as we still have racially segregated neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment and poverty.

The message for researchers is similar: if you confine your thinking or your variables to individuals, you risk ignoring more important variables.

Whatever Happened to “Broken Homes”?

December 11, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Just think about the last time you heard someone use the term “broken home” or “single-parent household” to explain the misbehavior or misfortune of a person in your social circle.” That’s from a Times op-ed (here) by Christina Cross, a sociology post-doc at Harvard.

I think the last time I heard “broken homes” was before Ms. Cross was born. It’s so 1950s, with its judgmental pronouncement on families that didn’t look like “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Father Knows Best.” In the 70s, as more middle-class people were getting divorced, we needed a less value-laden term. Enter “single parent.”

(Google nGrams shows the frequency of words in books, so the change in the use of these terms in the media and everyday talk probably happens a year or two earlier.)

“Single-parent” is not as blatantly stigmatizing as “broken homes,” but when we hear it, we still think that something is wrong. The more important point that Ms.  Cross makes is that broken homes — the harmful outcomes they bring — may be much more consequential for Whites than for Blacks. I hope to get to that in a later post. But for now, I'll just point out that the sharp decline in mentions of “single-parent” starting in the early 90s tracks with the decline of teen crime and teen pregnancy in the same period.

Alumn. . .us / a / i / ae / x?

December 9, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Welsey Yang, a writer by trade, must have been browsing messages from his alma mater, Rutgers, when this caught his attention. He posted it to Twitter.

(Click on an image for a larger view. I have added the blue oval for emphasis.)

English has a problem with words that are imported from Latin and Romance languages. What do we do about the gender and number that require Latin to have four different forms of the word? Alumnus, alumna, alumni, alumnae. It’s just too many to keep track of, especially since the plurals, masculine and feminine, sound alike.

The simple solution is to use a single form of the word to cover everyone, and that’s what many people have done. For that single form, there are two choices. One is alum, plural alums, which conveniently gets rid of those gendered endings in the Latin versions.

The other is the all-purpose alumni, which many Engish speakers now use indiscriminately for either gender and for singular or plural. It must drive Latin scholars up the ivy-covered wall. Both of these have been getting more popular lately. I searched for them on Nexis-Uni’s database of news sources.

(Some of the increase in these numbers may be attributable to the increased size of the Nexis database. But I doubt that it has grown by the multiple of 20-30 since the 1990s that we see for an alum and an alumni.)

A Google search for “she is an alumni of” gets 177,000 results, slightly less than the 191,000 for “she is an alumna of.” For men, “an alumnus” still outscores “an alumi” by a factor of 10, but that includes a lot of old sources. I would bet that the ratio decreases with time.

Personally, I would avoid the problem completely and go with graduates or, in less formal settings, grads.

The Rutgers Linguistic department has a different solution to the problem of gender: the very recent coinage alumnx, the word that inspired Yang to tweet. It’s a different sort of solution. The ungendered alum and the all-purpose alumni seem to have cropped up unplanned and without any ax to grind. But alumnx is a deliberate effort to change the language. What’s interesting here, as one of the Yang’s commenters points out, is that as linguists the department members are descriptivists, more interested in describing how people actually use language than in telling people which words to use. But here they are prescribing alumnx as the correct way avoid the less woke Latin forms.

My guess is that these x-words will have a short life. Most people don’t care much about the politics of speech and have little interest in changing. Remember “Freedom Fries”? Worse, alumnx and Latinx don’t resemble real words in English or in any other language.* It’s one thing to replace the “man” in policeman or fireman. “Police officer” and “fire fighter” were already part of the language well before the feminists of the 1960s called our attention to the sexism of the more frequently used terms.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these x-words will become as much a part of the language as Ms. In any case, I expect that the members of the department will, as descriptivist language researchers, monitor how well they are doing as prescriptivist language changers. (Or is it changerx?)

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* Latinx has similar problems. It’s not very popular among the people it is meant to designate, probably because neither English nor Spanish has words in this form. Terry Blas suggests (here) that a better gender-neutral solution would be an “e” rather than an “x” — Latine and Latines.

My So-Called War Crimes

December 3, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I first saw this item in my Google News feed, I thought it must be from The Onion or Andy Borowitz.

 But no, it was real, from the Daily Beast not a parody site. “If Donald Trump gets his wish, he’ll soon take the three convicted or accused war criminals he spared from consequence on the road as special guests in his re-election campaign.”

Why would war criminals be an asset for Trump? Trump’s base. of course, will not abandon him no matter what he does. But what is the gain? What virtues do these men embody that will pump up the enthusiasm and perhaps attract others.

First, let’s meet the war criminal who Trump has supported most strongly.

Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher and other Navy SEALs gave the young captive medical aid that day in Iraq in 2017, sedating him and cutting an airway in his throat to help him breathe. Then, without warning, according to colleagues, Chief Gallagher pulled a small hunting knife from a sheath and stabbed the sedated captive in the neck. A week later, Chief Gallagher sent a friend in California a text with a photo of himself with a knife in one hand, holding the captive up by the hair with the other. “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife,” he wrote. [NYT ]

Gallagher was acquitted of murder when another SEAL claimed to have killed the victim first, cutting off his breathing tube as an act of mercy. But apparently Trump and those who share his views think there’s something noble about knifing a dead man in the neck. Certainly Chief Gallagher thinks it’s something to brag about.

One SEAL sniper told investigators he heard a shot from Chief Gallagher’s position, then saw a schoolgirl in a flower-print hijab crumple to the ground. Another sniper reported hearing a shot from Chief Gallagher’s position, then seeing a man carrying a water jug fall, a red blotch spreading on his back. Neither episode was investigated and the fate of the civilians remains unknown.

The Times is being extremely careful here, saying that the fate of the civilians Gallagher shot “remains unknown.” But take a wild guess.

At trial, the SEALs were found not guilty.* But while the evidence may not have been sufficient for the military jury to convict the men, it was enough for the Navy to seek their removal from the SEALs. Trump intervened and forced the Secretary of the Navy to resign, effectively allowing Gallagher and the others to remain as SEALs.

What makes Gallagher so appealing to Trump, his followers, and Fox News? They deny the accusations, of course, but even if the men had been convicted, the case elicits ideas and emotions that are essential elements of much conservative world view in the US these days.

To begin with, supporting the SEALs requires a strong sense of tribalism. This tribalism goes far beyond the “loyalty” Jonathan Haidt sees as a “moral foundation” of conservative thinking. Tribalism sees the world as Them against Us. We are under constant threat from Them. This view obviously pervades domestic politics, where Trump’s go-to strategy has been to claim that Democrats are out to get him.** In foreign policy, it means that anything We do to Them is justified. Anything. Trump has voiced his preferences for torture, cages for border-crossing children, alligator-filled moats, and nuclear bombs, all on the grounds that these protect America from its various enemies. The willful killing of civilians easily fits into the list.

Therefore, We must defend the actual people who carry out these actions — the protectors of the country (the military, border guards, ICE) and the protectors of the social order (police). In practice, this means that there are no restraints on what they can do to people who are not Us or to people who dissent from or threaten the social order. So long as soldiers and cops are ostensibly doing their job, anything goes.

This defense of those who protect our tribe has an obvious corollary: American autonomy, an innocuous term for the idea that we should not be involved in any relationship of mutual regulation or obligation with other countries. “World government” has long been a trigger for the right, and they remain suspicious of the UN and other international pacts. What are “war crimes” after all except the product of international law, a concept which to US conservatives is illegitimate. So on Fox News, the shooting of a little girl or the knifing a wounded prisoner in the neck are “so-called war crimes.” The law that criminalizes these actions, in the America-first view, is not legitimate and is therefore null and void. No law, no crime.

Finally, the Trumpists see Gallagher as an example of the conservative ideal of masculinity. I have gone on too long already, and this really needs no further explanation. It’s enough to note that Trump refers to him admiringly as a “warrior.”
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*For most of the charges, the prosecution had no hard evidence, only the testimony of other SEALs.  The court convicted Gallagher on one count — the taking of a picture of the dead ISIS fighter. Kind of hard to ignore that photo he sent around. As for sniping at civilians, when Gallagher was shooting at the young girl, he didn’t take any selfies.

** This “out to get us” strategy was also part of Gallagher’s defense. His lawyers argued that the men who testified against him were motivated by a desire to get rid of him.

Cred — Authorship and Authenticity

November 25, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marjoe Gortner was a child prodigy Evangelical preacher. The 1972 documentary “Marjoe” includes home movies of him preaching at age four. The film, made when he was in his late twenties, shows him still at it, preaching to large crowds.  The spiritual and religious uplift he gives is palpable. But the film also shows Marjoe offstage saying to the filmmakers, “I can’t remember a time when I actually believed in God.” 

If a man does not practice what he preaches, must we ignore the content of the sermon? It might be a very good sermon. It might do what a sermon is supposed to do — cause many in the congregation to become more religious and more virtuous. Should we tell them to instead cover their ears?

Yesterday, I saw this tweet.

I recently peer reviewed a feminist article that cited Michael Kimmel’s work on how to be a “good man.” To state the obvious, this man has lost all credibility as an expert on this topic. Stop citing him. #MeToo  #MeTooPhD #MeTooSociology #AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter

Advice on how to be a good man, much like a sermon, is prescriptive. Once we learn that the preacher is an atheist, we probably won’t go to the next revival meeting. But what about works that are descriptive rather than prescriptive? Does the author’s behavior invalidate his expertise and  accuracy?

Not that long ago, Jack-Alain Léger, a White Frenchman, wrote books under the Arab-sounding name Paul Smaïl.

The first Smaïl novel, “Vivre Me Tue” (“Living Kills Me”), was published in 1997, and its author was received as a genuine voice of the Beur community. [Beur is a slang term for North Africans living in France.] North Africa specialists were as fooled as anyone else. Sales were strong; a successful movie adaptation was produced; subsequent Smaïl novels were published; and people wrote dissertations on the work of Paul Smaïl. [Christopher L. Miller, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity]

When the hoax was revealed, many people were outraged. The book was derided as inauthentic, incompetent, and racist. But as Miller says, “Léger was delighted to point out that until he emerged as the real author the books had seemed Beur enough to everybody.” In the same way, until the accusations against Kimmel became public, his writings seemed feminist enough to everybody.

But Kimmel is a social scientist. Smaïl’s novels were fiction. Are the rules stricter for social science? Should we require a higher level of authenticity, of congruence between the qualities and character of the writer and the content of the publications?
 
In a recent blog post (here) Andrew Gelman asks this question, putting it the same way we might ask it of fiction: “Does authorship matter at all?”*

Gelman blogs frequently about seriously flawed research, including outright fraud, and I expected that his answer would be “No. The data and analysis speak for themselves.” I was wrong.

Information about the authors can give a paper some street-cred. For example, remember that paper claiming that single women were 20 percentage points more likely to support Barack Obama during certain times of the month? That paper had both male and female authors. If all the authors were male, I wonder if it would’ve been considered too silly or too offensive to publish or to promote. [emphasis added]

Gelman writes mostly about quantitative research, so he is concerned with “any misrepresentation of data and metadata, which includes authorship as well as details of how an experiment was carried out, what steps were done in data processing and analysis, and so on.” So if we learn that the authors were not who they claimed to be, we should look very carefully at the details.

The accusations against Kimmel have cost him whatever street cred he might have had as a feminist and perhaps as a sociologist. I imagine he is now having a hard time getting his work published.

But read “Raise Your Son to Be a Good Man, Not a ‘Real’ Man” (here) published just a few months before the accusations became public, and see if you think that its advice should be cancelled.

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* It was Gelman’s post that led me to Léger/Smaïl. Gelman had been reading Louis Menand’s New Yorker article, which was based largely on Miller’s Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity.

Brought to You by the Number 九十二

November 23, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

We were at 79th and Broadway, and I wanted to tell the French couple that they had to go up to 98th St. I had overheard them looking at their phone and puzzling about directions. I don’t get much chance to speak French, so I asked, in French, if I could help them.

“Il faut aller jusqu’au . . .” I started, but it took me an extra moment to remember how to say “98" in French. “Au quatre-vingt dix huitième.”

I remember that my brother, a statistician by trade, once commented that France has had a disproportionate number of noted mathematicians, and he wondered if the difference might have something to do with how kids learn to count. Compared with English, counting in French involves more sophisticated mathematical operations. Once you get past 69, you can no longer use the base-10 template that worked for numbers in the 20s, 30s, and so on. Seventy is soixante-dix (sixty-ten); seventy-nine is soixante-dix neuf (sixty ten nine).*

After that you have to throw in some multiplication. Eighty is quatre-vingt (four twenty), and ninety-eight is quatre-vingt dix huit (four twenty ten eight) — 4 x 20 +10 +8.

In a recent BBC article (here), Anand Jagatia discusses the idea that how we count affects our ability in math. English, French, Dutch, Welsh all have slightly different ways of naming numbers. The biggest contrast is between Western systems and those of East Asia. 
 

In Mandarin, 92 is written ji shí èr, which translates as “nine ten two”. Japanese and Korean also use similar conventions. . . . Psychologists call systems like these “transparent”, where there is an obvious and consistent link between numbers and their names. There’s growing evidence that the transparency of a counting system can affect the way we process numbers.

The point is clearer if you use numbers rather than words — not “nine ten two” but “9 10 2.” To translate the Western “92” into math, you have to know about the tens place and the ones place. The Asian “9 10 2” shows more simply how the larger number is constructed from the smaller ones.

Does it make a difference?

Children who count in East Asian languages may have a better understanding of the base-10 system. In one study, first-grade children were asked to represent numbers like 42 using blocks of tens and units. Those from the US, France or Sweden were more likely to use 42 individual unit blocks, while those from Japan or Korea were more likely to use four blocks of ten and two single-unit blocks, which suggests that the children’s early mental representation of numbers may have been shaped by their language. [emphasis added]

I’m not sure what the evidence is on the stereotype notion that Asian students do better in math than do Western students. But if there is any factual basis, maybe the language of numbers accounts for some of the difference.

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* Belgians speak French, but they have simplified the numbers. Seventy and ninety are, respectively, septante and novante --- yet another reason for the French to look down on les belges. For some reason, eighty remains quatre-vingt.

Edward Shils

November 11, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Fabio linked to this recent tribute to Edward Shils by critic Joseph Epstein in Commentary. Shils was a brilliant man, a polymath. As Epstein says, “His writing . . . often aimed at a high level of generality in the German social-scientific tradition of Max Weber and George Simmel.” He was on the faculty at the University of Chicago, in both the Sociology Department and the Committee on Social Thought.

Two passages in Epstein’s piece caught my attention. In one, Epstein writes approvingly of Shils’s willingness to use the autocratic power of the university administration to stifle dissent.

When graduate students occupied the university’s administration building during the 1960s student protests, Levi [the president of the university], on Edward’s advice, told them to evacuate the building or be removed from the university. Those who chose to remain were summarily expelled, their principles intact but (in many cases) their academic careers ruined.

(One of the characterological hazards of being a conservative is smugness. Instead of  comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, conservatives often find pleasure in the afflicting of the afflicted. The final clause in that passage is a good example. Ah, those ruined careers. Serves ’em right. Epstein, in case it wasn’t clear, is a long-time conservative who regularly writes for conservative publications like Commentary and the Wall Street Journal.)

In another passage, Epstein speaks of Shils’s forthrightness (“he was a person who knew his mind and spoke it without looking over his shoulder”). For example,

He told me that at a dinner party he once queried a married woman who spoke admiringly of Philip Roth about what must be her concomitant admiration for adultery, since that was one of the specialties in Roth’s fiction

This is an incredibly stupid remark. It’s like saying that readers who admire Agatha Christie must also admire actual murder. (And by the way, since few of Roth’s protagonists are married, there isn’t all that much adultery in his novels. Deception is the most notable exception.) Yet here is Shils bragging to Epstein about insulting this woman as though his remark were a gem of Oscar Wilde-like wit. So yeah, Shils was brilliant, but not all the time.

Even dumber is that Epstein, in this remembrance of his “dear friend” chooses to include Shils’s bon mot. Much of Epstein’s writing over the years has been about literature (other topics as well, but mainly literature), and he himself has written many short stories. Surely he must appreciate the difference between fiction and reality.  Yet he repeats without comment Shils’s conflation of the two.

I was tempted to give this post the title “When Smart People Say Stupid Things.” Nil nisi bonum and all that, but Shils died 24 years ago, and Epstein is still alive and writing.

Proclaiming an Idealized History

November 6, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

“These people don’t have mothers and fathers. They have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.”

I read Roger Brown’s excellent textbook Social Psychology at least four decades ago, but I still remember that sentence. It’s from the chapter on the authoritarian personality.  Most people when asked about their parents give more or less objective assessments. But those who score high on measures of authoritarianism paint a highly idealized portrait.

That preference for seeing only the ideal may apply not just to the home but to the homeland.

The sentence came to mind when I was reading a WaPo story today about the Presidential Proclamation making November the National American History and Founders Month. In case you hadn’t heard, President Trump issued that proclamation last week. NAH&FM is a new one, sharing November with, among others, National Family Caregivers Month and Heart Month, which Trump also proclaimed as did his predecessors. But those presidents, since Bush 41 have also proclaimed November as National Native American Heritage Month.  Last week, that proclamation did not appear.

Some people jumped to the conclusion that Trump was substituting the Founding Fathers for Native Americans. Not true. The Native American Heritage Month proclamation did appear on the White House website, though not till  yesterday and backdated to Oct. 31. But the larger point remains: Trump and his hardcore conservative supporters refuse to acknowledge any flawed motives in anything that the US — or Trump — has ever done. That includes the heritage of Native Americans, which on its face certainly raises questions about the motives and behavior of White men in America.

National Native American Heritage Month is a tacit acknowledgment of past sins, as if to say, “Yes, we may have stolen your land and slaughtered your people by the tens of thousands in the process, but we’ll give you a piece of November each year to make up for it.”  Trump’s proclamation does not, of course, mention any of that. Instead, in typical Trump fashion — “this isn’t about you, it’s about me” — it advertises all the wonderful things “my Administration” (the phrase appears five times in five short paragraphs) is doing for Native Americans.

Why add National American History and Founders Month? The proclamation explains. “To continue to advance liberty and prosperity, we must ensure the next generation of leaders is steeped in the proud history of our country.” That sounds nice, but immediately the critics chimed in. “Some historians slammed the statement for an oversimplified and glorified portrayal of a national history that is far more complex.” Well, what do they expect — complexity? From a Presidential Proclamation? From Donald Trump?

Still, the criticism speaks to an idealized version of America promoted by conservatives, and not just in proclamations at WhiteHouse.gov. Red staters who protest the removal of statues of Confederate heroes, for example, and who continue to display the Confederate flag prefer a history where secession had no trace of tainted motives — motives like racism. In a similar way, conservatives find no impure intent in what White people did in the the westward expansion. Or if they do allow that some bad things happened, they see these in a “balanced” way, much like Trump’s view of the White nationalist rally in Charlottesville (“good people on both sides”).

Here for example is the conclusion to a long article in the right-wing magazine Commentary:

In the end, the sad fate of America’s Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash.

That was written in 2004, more than a decade before Trump echoed the “well-meaning people in both camps” idea. It is yet another example of belief that even if the US winds up doing terrible things, we should be judged by our intentions. Even if we did kill all those Indians and take their land, our hearts and our homeland are always pure. A happy November to all.