Monday, August 20, 2007
Happy Happy Happy
You know things are going to be grim with a story headlined:
Poll: White Youths Happier Than Others Unsurprising if true, though that isn't what the poll actually measured. Unless, of course, you ignore the minor detail that there is no control for the relationships between how folks feel and what they'll tell a pollster. Given the exact same feeling, are whites equally likely than others to report being satisfied? I don't see anything trying to show that this is true.
(For those of you who want to insist that, in order to poke this hole in the study, I'd have to prove that there would be difference, you simply don't understand how statistics works. The conclusion the writer is drawing requires the assumption that there would be no difference. The faith you have in the conclusion is the same as what you have in the assumption. Hence, the proper way to report this study is to give the actual result, and then note the assumption if you're going to try to draw the conclusion. Since the study doesn't address the assumption's legitimacy, the reporter certainly shouldn't try to, either. We don't grant assumptions just because we can't prove they're false. But Bush hates science.)
Sex: Sixty percent of white youths are happy with their sex lives, compared with 46 percent of minorities. Both groups are about equal on the sexual activity scale. The sexual activity scale? I'm imagining a bed with an accelerometer. By the way, does this confirm the stereotype about minorities wanting more sex? Another interesting set of quotes:
"It doesn't surprise me," said Martin Carpenter, 21, a black New Jersey resident. "There's a lot of issues out there for African-American young adults. You can still go to certain places and feel uncomfortable, like you don't belong there."
Martin's feeling about racism, real or perceived, was echoed in the survey: 28 percent of minorities believe race will hurt them in the quest for a better life. Among whites, 20 percent feel their race will help in getting ahead.
...
Carpenter, one of the survey participants, spoke for the majority of minority youths who feel their race will not cause problems later in life.
"I don't think so," he said. "I'm thinking on a smaller scale. In my community, it's not that big a deal." What a grand fellow, speaking for the majority of minority youths. I hope he got their permission.
Those two sets of quotes seem rather incongruous, too. They refer to the guy by his last name in the second set, and his first in the first, which may help to hide the fact that this story apparently says that he both "spoke for the majority of minority youths who feel their race will not cause problems later in life" and was the example of the person who has feelings that are reflected by youths who do think that. I guess one could argue that the 28 percent is reflective of his feelings in the sense that 72 percent don't feel that way, but then it seems like a completely broken connection in the first two paragraphs. Talking about how blacks have issues and feel they don't belong in many places is the feeling that being black won't cause problems?
The AP-MTV poll was conducted by Knowledge Networks Inc. from April 16 to 23, and involved online interviews with 1,280 people aged 13 to 24. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Online interviews, eh? Don't you think the target group of youths who'll give online interviews might be a bit unrepresentative to use for drawing conclusions about all youths?
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