Week 1: Is it good science or not?
What is going on my friends?! I hope that everyone had a wonderful week. I am excited to share what I learned in my family relations class with you all! It was the first week that I was there so we will see what I remember.
The main thing that we talked about as a class was about how
hard it can be to interpret and find good social science studies. What I mean
by finding good studies is the way that the research is conducted. For example,
we can get a study that shows that drinking soda is a better way to stay
hydrated than water itself. Well, that can be intriguing or even surprising to
see something like that to be true. What we need to do then is to look at the
data. We need to look at who they studied, where they did the experiment on,
the number of people, and basically how they did it. A lot of the times studies
are conducted with the convince of the person conducting the research. In other
words, the researcher will ask people that they know or people that live close
to him/her. That is bad data. In order to gather data and be able to apply it
to the world, or even the nation, it needs to be a random sample so that we can
avoid bias.
An example of this that we talked about in class was an
article called “Same-Sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination
of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting.”
Now as a side note, I know that this is a very touchy subject and I will not be
giving my opinion on same-sex relationships, but rather use this article as an
example of bad research data. This article it is saying that kids have the
same outcomes in having same-sex parents as being raised by a single mother.
Now if we look at the data there were many errors. The main one was that they did
not use many heterosexual comparison groups. If you look at the table, there
are only a few studies that they did that. That is like when someone says that
they do not like seafood but have never tried all of the seafood that there is.
The other problem was that their sample sizes were way too small to even draw a
conclusion. The most that they had was 2,431 gays/lesbians but again they did
not compare the sample to heterosexual people, so that makes it invalid. Most of
the studies have been done with at least forty to one hundred and fifty people.
When I looked up on google to know what a good sample size of a study was the
minimum was about five hundred people or at least ten percent of the
population.
On page 738 of the study, it clearly states, “Results
of this study must be interpreted cautiously due to several factors. First, the
study sample was small (N=45) and biased toward well-educated, white women with
high incomes.” This was also another major factor in most of the studies. They
were targeting lesbians that were well off financially and had a good education. How
can someone say that this information can relate to everyone while everyone is not
the same in that sense? Some people have kids and are on the other
end of the poverty line and why just white women?
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