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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27854 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.

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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