Methodology in the News

April 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. “Survey Research Can Save Your Life,” says Joshua Tucker at the Monkey Cage. He links to this NBC news story about a woman who went into diabetic shock while on the phone with a student pollster working for Marist.  He sensed something was wrong and told his supervisor.  She spoke to the woman and then called 911.  (The news story does not identify the student working the phone survey, only the supervisor.  Nor does it say whether the woman approved or disapproved of Mayor Bloomberg.)

2.  The New York Times this week reported on a RAND study that found no relation between obesity and “food deserts.”  The study used a large national sample; it’s undoubtedly comprehensive.  The problem is that if you are using a national sample of schools or supermarkets or stores or whatever,  two units that fall into the same category on your coding sheet might look vastly different if you went there and looked at them from close range. 

Peter Moskos at Cop in the Hood took a closer look at the RAND study, reported in the Times, RAND relied on a pre-existing classification of businesses. The prefix code 445 indicates  a grocery store. Peter, an ethnographer at heart, has his doubts:

New York is filled with bodega “grocery stores” (probably coded 445120) that don't sell groceries. You think this matters? It does. And the study even acknowledges as much, before simply plowing on like it doesn't. A cigarette and lottery seller behind bullet-proof glass is not a purveyor of fine foodstuffs, and if your data doesn't make that distinction, you need to do more than list it as a “limitation.” You need to stop and start over.

3.  NPR’s “Morning Edition” had a story (here) on death penalty research, specifically on the question of deterrence.  A National Research Council panel headed by Daniel Nagin of Carnegie Mellon University reviewed all the studies and concluded that they were inconclusive, mostly for methodological reasons.  For example, most deterrence studies looked at the death penalty in isolation rather than comparing it with other specified punishments. 

Another methodological problem not mentioned in the brief NPR story is that the number of executions may be too small to provide meaningful findings.  For that we’d need a much larger number of cases.  So this is one time when, at least if you are pro-life, an inadequate sample size isn’t all bad.

New York Education – Gifted, Talented, and Crazy

April 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Individual facts may be very useful for explaining other individual facts. But in explaining social facts, they don’t always get us very far. This Durkheimian notion is one of  the first ideas I try to convey in my course (the first in our sequence of core courses for majors). 

Newspaper stories sometimes provide good bad examples. The New York papers today report on the results of the Gifted-and-Talented tests for public schools. Times recently ran a story with this headline:

After Number of Gifted Soars,

a Fight for Kindergarten Slots

Most of the article is about test prep for tots. It quotes Robin Aronow, former PS 9 parent, now an “admissions consultant”

[test prep] certainly seems to be having an influence.  There are more and more people who are putting their kids through some sort of test preparation, whether it’s buying the materials or using the test-prep companies . . .  I think the nursery schools have begun to integrate some of the materials into their classes as well.

No doubt, the trend is real.  Here are the numbers.

It’s possible that shelling out $150 an hour or more for test prep might improve your kid’s chances of making the G&T cutoff.  But these individual facts do not explain the doubling of numbers and percents shown in the graph.  If there’s any connection, the causal arrow will point the other way: increases in G&T qualifiers causes parents to buy test prep for their kids.    

What is driving the increase if not better test prep?  My guess is economic history. The recession has changed the population of test-taking tots; it now includes more kids from well-educated, better-off families. These parents, who once might have sent their kids to private school, have been discovering the virtues of public education, especially if they do the math and realize that over the K-12 span, that $40,000 a year adds up to a half million.  A demographic trend the Times story mentions – more families staying in the city rather than moving to the suburbs – contributes to the same effect.

When my son took the test for New York high schools, I commented to the dad of another test-taker that 27,000 kids were taking the test that day. He was unfazed by the apparent odds. “Twenty-five thousand – background noise,” he said.

That ratio of real competition to background noise has shifted, especially for kindergarten hopefuls, thanks to those economic and demographic changes. As a result, according to a test prep company founder, “the idea of preparing for the kindergarten test is totally the norm.”

If you don’t live in New York City, you may look at these norms – $150-an-hour test-prep courses for a four-year-old – and think, “Are these people crazy?”  I thought that way myself once.  I grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb (pop. 40,000). For K-6, kids went (usually on foot) to the local elementary school. There were two junior high schools (you went to the closer one) and one high school. No choice, no questions asked. Not until it was time for college did we survey our choices, visit schools, send off applications, take standardized tests, and go for interviews. In New York, middle-class families do all that for kindergarten and even pre-school. And many do it again for middle school and again for high school.  

I thought it was crazy, but still I did it.  My kid  was four.  “This is crazy,” I said to the test-giver, a psychologist, “scores for kids this age aren’t stable or predictive.”  She nodded.  Welcome to education in New York city.  

white on White

April 10, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Black is not a color,” says Philip Cohen in a blog post  explaining why he has decided to use upper case when writing about Black and White as racial categories. I agree. The title of that post is a tad coy. A more straightforward title might be, “black is a color, Black is a race.”  (I think the style manual still says to use italics when you refer to a word as a word.) 

It’s a small change, upper case for lower case, but it might move us one step away from the frequent conflating of the racial and the chromatic.

My favorite example of this color/race tangle happened here at Montclair.  A few years ago, the University became home to the work of artist George Segal, famous for his life-size, white-patina-on-bronze sculptures.  Montclair has, as our Web page boasts, “the only George Segal art gallery in the world.”  It’s housed in the most important building on campus, the parking garage.  Close by is this 1992 Segal sculpture “Street Crossing,” which came to the University in 2006 when the gallery opened.  (It has had two or three different placements.)

The Public Art Fund describes it this way:

Caught in an ambiguous psychological terrain, the seven figures seem blind to one another and to their surroundings. Segal had a particular ability to elevate mundane day-to-day activities into a lyrical or elegiac display, depicting his subjects with their guard down and in a naturalistic stance.

Maybe so.  But shortly after the sculpture was installed, a non-faculty employee here wrote to the president of the university from a different critical perspective.  The letter said, in effect, “This university prides itself on its efforts for diversity.  And then the biggest deal on campus is this sculpture of nothing but white people.”

The president wrote back explaining that the sculpture was a work of art blah, blah, blah.  And perhaps the employee was mollified.

But the problem here is not Art appreciation; the problem is not even race and diversity.  The problem is language. We need two words where we have only one.  Here’s another photo of the Segal piece.

After I heard the president tell this story, I asked our undergraduate assistant Heather to let me photograph her standing next to one of the figures in the sculpture.  Heather is, undoubtedly, a white girl.  She has very fair skin. Compared with her, I look positively swarthy. (Heather is also very good looking, and this photo, taken in strong sunlight – terrible light for photography – and unretouched, does her a real disservice.) Her skin is not the color of the Segal figure.

Still, we seem to be stuck with the same word, white, for both Heather and for the figures in the sculpture. But they are obviously not the same. No White person, even the palest and fairest, is that shade of white. If the word for White as a race were different from the word for white as a color, the offended employee might never have found cause to complain.  She would not have seen the sculpture as a bunch of “White people.”  

Do we have such a word?  Caucasian might do – you couldn’t say that the Segal figures were Caucasian – but the term is too long, and it implies a geographical link to the Caucasus that most White people don’t share. Besides, it’s part of a typology which has gone out of fashion in this country.

So at least for now, the only way I have to make the color/race distinction is with the shift key.

Is This Racist?

April 8, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston

“The Haves and the Have Nots” said the marquee on the Beacon Theater.  I thought maybe it was a rock group, you know, like The Mamas and the Papas. 

We met our friends – a couple and their kids age 14, 17, and 23 – at a restaurant just around the corner.  I asked the three teenagers if they’d ever heard of such a group.  No.

It was early, 5:30, and there were only a few other diners in the place, mostly middle-aged African Americans.  Then it dawned on me – pre-theater dinner.  “I wonder if it's one of those Tyler Perry plays,” I said. 

My wife shot me a look and a very brief sentence, both of which meant, “Shut up.   You'll probably say something offensive and loud enough to be heard by these people at the table behind us.”

I knew that she was afraid I'd use the term chitlin circuit.  And maybe I would have.  I’d used it before.  In public.  But dammit, Skip Gates used the term in the New Yorker in a wonderful article about this genre of drama.  If he can, why can’t I? Or is chitlin circuit* one of those terms like the N-word that can be used only by the in-group?  What other words have this OK-for-us-not-for-you quality?

When I got home I Googled “The Haves,” and indeed it is a Tyler Perry play.  I reread the Gates article, written in 1997, before Perry became so successful.  It holds up.

I’m thinking of buying a ticket and going.  John Darbyshire, the National Review writer, would tell me that I’m risking life and limb.  Now that’s racist (his rant is here, but don’t say I didn’t trigger-warn you).

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*  Wikipedia says that “chitlin circuit” is “now also known as the ‘urban theater circuit.’”