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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   27793 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Keep in mind that the 'data' here is a poll by a right-wing think tank. The data basically says that conservative parents said they have a good relationship with their children and that their children have good mental health on a single survey. /shrug.

Polling definitely isn't useless in general, but there are things it can tell you and things it can't. In particular, surveys of minors like this typically contact the parent, and have the parent ask their child questions and then fill in the survey for them; there's bound to be confounds between parenting style and what your child tells you when you ask them these types of questions, 'lying to my strict father that everything is fine so he doesn't get mad' is a trope for a reason.

I can't prove to you post hoc that I would have dismissed this survey if it had come out closer to my preferred beliefs, maybe I'm stupid enough that I wouldn't have, but I hope I would have and I do think I should have, in that hypothetical.

A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches".

Note that it's not actually inconsistent to say that 'The big decrease in mental health compared to past generations is caused primarily by social media' and 'The biggest factor explaining the differences in mental health between different kids today is parenting style'.

If all kids in your survey are similarly saturated in social media, then social media will explain very little of the variance in your data because everyone gets the same exposure. That doesn't mean that social media isn't having a huge effect on everyone, just that this effect is uniform in your data set.

It's sort of like how intelligence is very very highly heritable if you only measure among affluent college kids who signed up for your study, and a lot less heritable if you take a global sample that includes people with childhood malnutrition and lack of education access. These are all measures of the amount of explained variance in your data set, you have to think about what types of variance that data set does and doesn't capture in order to interpret it correctly.

But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this.

Does it not?

I guess I don't have evidence on this, but I just assumed that it's still the case that rural children spend less time on screens and more time outside than urban children, even if the gap is shrinking.

Also, if the political difference (presuming one exists) were caused by conservative parents limiting screen time and/or banning social media, that's still congruent with those things being the proximal causal factor.

Keep in mind that the 'data' here is a poll by a right-wing think tank. The data basically says that conservative parents said they have a good relationship with their children and that their children have good mental health on a single survey. /shrug.

Am I missing something here? The second paragraph says this:

My colleagues and I at Gallup launched a study this summer to understand the causes. We surveyed 6,643 parents, including 2,956 who live with an adolescent, and we surveyed an additional 1,580 of those adolescents. We asked about mental health, visits to doctors, parenting practices, family relationships, activities, personality traits, attitudes toward marriage, and other topics, including excessive social media use, as discussed in prior work. I present the results in a new Institute for Family Studies and Gallup research brief.

The author is one Jonathan Rothwell, who is an employee of Gallup. This is easily verifiable by Google. So the polling wasn't done by the IFS but by Gallup. Is Gallup a right-wing think tank? Furthermore, he claims that they surveyed the adolescents as well, quite comprehensively given the large list of topics he describes them covering.

What is the basis on which you're claiming that the results are simply from conservative parents claiming their children have good mental health?

Gallup was hired by IFS to conduct the survey. This is how pretty much all survey firms work, they're not independent research organizations, they take contracts from clients who want the survey run, and those clients then own the data and decide if/how it is released and distributed.

The fact that Gallup is involved is definitely legitimizing, they have a reputation that won't let them intentionally collect biased data or allow clients who mention their name to lie about what the data say too much without speaking up. As compared to if IFS had done the calling internally or with a less famous vendor.

But at the end of the day, IFS still commissioned the poll and determined what it would ask about and how the questions would be formed, and is in control of how the findings are released.

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