For religious people, it is much easier to consider something like adultery to be totally out of the question, because it's a sin.

Hah. Show me one study that suggests religious people are more faithful to their spouses than non-religious ones.

Since I objected to what I saw as chick's bigotry, I have to object to this as well. Please don't tell me that you really think religious people have stronger morals than nonreligious people. Didn't the Inquisition, the jihad of your choice, the Quaker who bombed Cambodia, the latest parish scandal, teach you anything?

.... Arkitekton, my conservative friend, please tell me you're not this daft....

The entirety of Crispix's paragraph went:

"For religious people, it is much easier to consider something like adultery to be totally out of the question, because it's a sin. But for non-religious people...well, it's a victimless sin. Unless the "victim" becomes aware that it has occurred."

There is a claim of superiority for religious people in Crisxix's paragraph, and that claim has an implicit moral component since he specifically uses the word, "sin". (If you can find one theologian who considers each of sin and morality to be entirely distinct, one from the other, I will be astonished and impressed.) If we assume for the purposes of this discussion that adultery is wrong, whether we describe it in religious terms as "sinful", or in secular terms, as "unjust", to claim that religious persons are less likely to commit adultery inevitably equates, for a religious person, that greater ability to resist as a moral superiority, at least in the case of adultery. Following this, giving examples of how people professing faith are regularly capable of committing atrocities may be rhetorically crude, but not at all out of line with the preceding.

So, no, JC, not daft. At least not here and not yet. If you tried "Easily confused", or "given to rhetorical bludgeons when scalpels would prove better", I'd have to cede the point.

ok -

a serious question - for just a minute, let's forget that kevin is the one who is originally asking the question (to get rid of THAT error - or is it bias)

i want to know how anyone knows whether or not a person who fills out any anonymous survey is telling the truth about his/her answers?

i mean, there is a big difference between asking people about getting kids their shots and asking them whether they had gay sex or ever had sex with anyone besides their spouse during their marriage

the probability people would lie about shots is a LOT lower than they would lie or "misremember" sex they just might could feel ashamed about.

a lot of people don't want to admit to them self that they cheated so why would they admit it on a survey?

how can you "correct for error" when you got no idea what the error actually IS?

Arki -

The article JC references also has in the discussion an alternate possibility ... that is, the relationship between religious belief and infidelity may be (is likely) not one-way causal. I actually disagree somewhat with this section, in that I believe that a spurious relationship is likely -- with my lens, I see religious belief driven by social norms more than vice versa.

Several important limitations of this research underscore the need for
caution in interpreting these findings and the need for further research into
the links between religion and marital infidelity. First and most important,
the cross-sectional nature of the GSS data and the wording of the item tapping
infidelity make it impossible to establish the causal direction of these
empirical associations. Rather, our study has identified significant patterns
or associations between religious involvement and extramarital sexual
activity. Although it seems unlikely that the associations reported here are
spurious, it is plausible that they are bidirectional in nature. For example,
consistent with research on the links between religion and cohabitation
(Thornton et al., 1992), it is conceivable that religious factors influence the
likelihood of adultery, which in turn affects religious involvement (e.g., perhaps
diminishing religious attendance or biblical literalism). Such a causal
process could result in overestimation of the possible religious influence on
infidelity in cross-sectional data. Although we are aware of no existing
cohort-based data that will allow adjudication of these issues, it should be
an urgent priority for future research.

i want to know how anyone knows whether or not a person who fills out any anonymous survey is telling the truth about his/her answers?

You generally don't know for a particular individual. But you have comparative studies -- where using different survey techniques on the same sample, or randomly equivalent samples, for certain types of questions -- that compare the probability of the socially undesirable response for the different data collection methods. From a bunch of these studies, you can say (simplified) "if XX percent say that they did Z using data collection method A that means YY percent would using data collection method B." It won't be as precise as if you using method B in the first place, but it's better than a wild guess. If you compare back to a more accurate or intrustive or expensive measure, you can get a decent estimate using the less reliable method.

The same technique is used for when a variable is measured with multiple instruments, or you need to use a simple method for reason of time or monetary cost for some variable in your study (e.g. MMSE instead of a clinic diagnosis of dementia). There are probably other methods as well, but this is the main idea behind most.

dca,

i'm sorry, but i don't guess i understand your answer. suppose you use 10 different ways to collect data - basically asking 1000 people trying to get the answer to the question - when you were married, did you have any sex with anyone who was not your spouse. i know you ask the questions in a different way. suppose they all agree exactly - 400 people say yes, i did.

HOW do you know whether or not 1 person or half of the people answering lied since you can't check their answers? why would you think that a person would lie/misremember no matter HOW it was asked because it is the same real question

As a long time father of teenaged daughters I'd like to pass along a little helpful advice to those about to go through the experience of raising adolescent females.

When you bury a boy for the first time ... make sure you dig the grave deep--that way you can reuse the grave shaft leaving you enough room on your lawn should you wish to put in a pool or garden.

There's another benefit to this approach. The hardest thing isn't talking to your daughter about sex--it's explaining why your one dog has her boyfriend's rotting femur in his mouth while the other is rolling in the rest of the remains. If you dig deep, you can avoid this uncomfortable conversation.

Just remember the motto: "For a good night's sleep just bury 'em deep."

Do not feel squeamish about doing this if you're religious--you're just helping him make it to heaven before he does something that will land him in hell.

Blest Regards

John

Ha! My wife brought up the Clemens-McCready thing last night, using the exact same quote "how would *I* feel" And I replied precisely as DMN did - it won't stop at 18 or 30, but when I am dead.

Holy crap on a popsicle how did all you guys end up feeling so damned AWFUL and terrible about one of the greatest types of interactions two people on the face of the planet can have? The more comments I read like this the more depressed I get about humanity.

I get the feeling most men would sooner have their daughters punched in the face than ever have sex, apparently about which there is absolutely nothing good or positive at all. Sad, fundamentalist thoughts. And don't give me the crap about not having daughters. I have teenage cousins with whom I am very close. I don't want them abused, but lord knows I kinda want them to have joyful human experiences, of which sex is one of the best.

i'm sorry, but i don't guess i understand your answer. suppose you use 10 different ways to collect data - basically asking 1000 people trying to get the answer to the question - when you were married, did you have any sex with anyone who was not your spouse. i know you ask the questions in a different way. suppose they all agree exactly - 400 people say yes, i did.

Method 1 is ask them if they cheated; method 2 is to hire a PI to check them out. You do this one time, and you get an equivalency formula. The idea is that there is a way to get a more reliable response, but it's onerous and expensive and impractical. But once you figure out the degree of underreporting, you can do the easy way (the questionnaire) from then on. You can also generalize from similar questions, things that you might be able to verify independently.

Or, to use the example of dick size that was brought up early. You ask guys how big they are, then you measure them. They measure 2 inches less on average.* Next survey, you just ask them ... and then you subtract 2 inches.

* the difference isn't due just to lying. most people just aren't that great at estimating the sizes of things, and even an honest estimate may be biased. this takes care of all of that.

Like asking someone how much they smoke. They say a pack a day, adding 1/4 to 1/2 a pack to that would almost always be accurate. And they REALLY BELIEVE they smoke a pack a day, they aren't being dishonest at all, to their perception. A mind is a powerful thing, as far as belief goes.

baseball chick, think of it this way.

One survey asks questions about sexual behavior of, say, 5,000 people. These include whether they're churchgoers, and a bunch of other things like how educated they are, what race or ethnicity they are, how old, and so forth. This is done by having interviewers ask questions in their home and recording the answers.

Running some statistical tests, they see that there is likely a significant difference between the churchgoers and the non-churchgoers regarding infidelity.

A second survey does the same thing to the same number of people, but it's a different group of people and instead of in-person interviews, when it comes to the questions about infidelity they give the person a computer and let them enter their answers without the interviewer see them.

Now, imagine this is done ten different times, with the questions asked differently and the way the information is collected being done differently. Maybe it's on the phone and not face to face. Maybe the person selected in the sample - because people aren't allowed to select themselves to eliminate a source of bias - is interviewed by someone not of their race or ethnicity or sex, because some research has shown that a white male will give different answers to a white male than he will a black woman, or a Latina will answer differently when interviewed by a black woman than by another Latina, and so forth.

And let's say that about 80% of the time, different studies using different methods and different questions show that the churchgoers tend to be more faithful than those that aren't churchgoers, and it's statistically significant. At that point, I think you have say maybe there's something to it, and maybe it's religion. Oh, one thing I forgot to add. The relationship between churchgoing and infidelity is true when you hold all other things equal - it's not race, it's not rural, it's not income that seem to be driving this relationship.

Kirby Kyle made a really good analogy over in the Lounge, where he said he's done hard and social science research. One point he made reiterated a point DCA made, that because there's more noise (bias, variation) in the data than in the hard sciences - like with atmospheric science per DCA - it's harder to be certain.

Kirby's brilliance was on display when he compared that to analyzing fielding stats versus batting stats in baseball. Just because it's harder to measure fielding than it is batting doesn't mean that it should be entirely disregarded. If you've got three different fielding measurements that approach the question differently saying that Derek Jeter or David Ortiz is a terrible fielder then at some point the weight of evidence suggests that, even though there is some uncertainty there, it may be well to make Ortiz your DH.

Lassus Posted: April 30, 2008 at 07:18 PM (#2764626)

I get the feeling most men would sooner have their daughters punched in the face than ever have sex

- grinning

you don't have a daughter. and i would bet you any father would tell you it is not the same.

it isn't your daddy don't never want you to have sex/get married/be loved

it is your daddy KNOW that teenage guys/older guys/middle age guys gonna disrespect you when you are 15 and he remember ALL about it and he don't want some guy hurting his Baby Grrrrrl.

- smile

it is kinda special, you know. because your daddy the ONE man in the world who loves you if your ass fat/your ass skinny/you not pretty/you not smart/you not cool/you not popular/you not whatever - AND he's the ONE man you don't have to worry if he's gonna love you and you KNOW he not gonna screw you and he gonna make sure other males do right by you. you got NO idea how bad a teenage grrl need that. we really DO.

most of the sex you do when you a teenage grrrl got exactly zero to do with "love" and most of the time you think it is something you HAVE to do to keep that boy and you depressed about it. and you worried about what you look like and what he thought you look like and how he probably thinking of some other female or not even about you. or how he disrespects you BECAUSE you let him. and trust me i have talked to a LOT of other grrrls and they sure as heck ain't gonna tell YOU that.

smile

then again i got married when i was a teenage grrrl and i knew he was right because i didn't feel disgusted/depressed/humilited/used.

bigger smile

smartest thing i ever done in my life

DCA, I mean no offense whatever, but as I am sometimes guilty of when writing of my own field, the jargon in your post 459 is largely incomprehensible. If you'd care to rephrase, I have little doubt I'll enjoy engaging with your thoughts. Thanks.

What? You think the author of a paper is going to fess up to flawed methodological process? At the very least, you should have called someone else who didn't have a vested interest is supporting the data. That's called o-b-j-e-c-t-i-v-i-t-y. This statement highlights in bold relief how badly JC understands how science operates and what valid science is all about.

kevin, for the third time the researcher who wrote that paper had nothing to do the survey that collected the data she analyzed. The survey that she drew from is highly regarded by pretty much everyone in the universe who understands the nature of social science research, which you clearly don't. You're making wildly incoherent arguments that ignore the fact that uncertainty exists in almost every single bit of data collected, including in the hard sciences where error may creep in.

I'm done. You really don't get it.

Noooooo. Science is science. The scientific method can be applied to social studies and be called scienceas long as it adheres to fundamental scientific principles! One of those principles is: Devise experiments to test hypotheses and all valid scientific hypotheses must be testable.

Actually, they must be falsifiable, not testable. Not the same thing at all.

You're embarrassing yourself even further, Kevin. Nobody believes you're a scientist any more than you're a naval aviator.

More misreading. I criticised the methodologies!!!! Let me write that again, so you don't get confused: M-E-T-H-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. There. Can you read that now?

Uhhhhh.... I'M confused. Those are two different words.

OK, normally I find snarking on typos to be rather pathetic, but this was too difficult to pass by uncommented upon.

So what? She wrote the ####### paper using the data. You think she's going to tell you how much the data sucks on a paper she chose to base her study on?

Isn't it standard in academic papers to acknowledge potential weakness in the research and areas where further research is needed?

Or in your experience does one assert, attack, dissemble, obfuscate, and deny uncertainty and call it science?

From where I sit comfortably, it sure as hell looks like it.

And anyway, she wrote in the passage DCA posted how unreliable the data is so, if even she (the author) is backing away from any firm conclusions, I don't know where JC gets off saying how definitive it is.

God you're an idiot. She's actually exhibiting the scientific method you're talking about; iow, saying, "Here's the thesis, this is what the data shows and this is how I interpret the data. We must be cautious, these things are instruments of measurement, and we know how those work. They are not the things themselves, but instruments to measure them and as instruments, they have limitations. Here are those limitations."

You're so dense about this as scotto and others have pointed out you continue to confuse the distinction b/w the gathering of the evidence and the interpretive model. She didn't gather the evidence. I didn't contact her to ask about her evidence. I contacted her to discuss the method of interpretation and the problems in social scientific research. Unlike you, she's a good scientist, was utterly candid about the limitations of social science (much as she was in the passage you bolded and which in your bottomless ignorance you thought somehow counted against her), but stuck by her conclusions (which she also acknowledged were open to study and refutation by others).

And I love how you easily impugn her character, implying she'd falsify the soundness of her approach. You're a scientific scoundrel, a charlatan. And I say that in all seriousness. We're supposed to play nice about you and your scientific aplomb, but it's ironic you have no qualms about attacking her as too interested to be honest about her study's limitations. Guess what? You were wrong about that.

AP:

Mindy McCready has “caught her breath” and gone back to work on a new album following her admission of a long-standing relationship with Roger Clemens, a representative for the country star said Wednesday.

“The first day was really difficult for her. She really has caught her breath,” her management consultant, John Dotson, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
...
Dotson said McCready will be meeting with a New York-based public relations firm this week to “see what to do next.”

“We want to be sure we don’t inadvertently do something wrong,” he said.

So which tab/mag is going to get the exclusive, far-ranging interview w/ flattering cover shot for next week's issues?

God you're an idiot.

JC, I have to say that typically you are careful to characterize assertions made by people with which you disagree with as idiotic, but here you take it to the next level by calling kevin an idiot. I'm sure you did this after considering it.

Weight of evidence in this thread suggests (shakes magic 8 ball) Yes!

I've had enough of this, but this time I'm really done. Good night!

That's what the peer review process is all about.

I may know what I'm talking about, unlike you, but I'm an idiot for replying again.

So, you assert her study wasn't peer-reviewed?

Which is like a nuclear engineer saying of chemistry that it's just morons playing with beakers, that chemistry is the science failed scientists get into: dismissive and insulting.

My wife, a nuclear engineer, says this about me, a chemist, plenty.

Social Science and Science are both limited.

Social Science has some variables that are difficult to measure with any sort of accuracy. However, due to the focus on impact and the tools of the fields, there are a lot of people who are talented at practically applying the findings.

Science often has a great degree of accuracy, however the impact of the science in a societal context is often neglected. That's why we get the "Guided missiles, misguided men" dynamic that Dr. King referred to and has only gotten more extreme since his untimely death.

The fielding analysis/cheating analysis analogy doesn't work for me. With fielding, as with the black-hating voters and the mysterious shrinking genitalia, the data points are all known and verifiable. For baseball, you can read the official counts of errors and chances and such, and if that's not good enough for you, you can get the PBP data, or even go into the tape room and watch every play and graph 'em all yourself. If you want to check the election results, you can re-count the responses and re-count the votes. If you want to measure the all-important penis question, you have a bunch of photos of people's meat next to a ruler.

With an infidelity study, all you have is a series of educated guesses about how often people lie. You don't have the same kind of documentary evidence as in the other cases. For the two to be truly analogous, you'd need to have supremely talented investigators follow each and every one of your subjects for their entire lives, meticulously documenting each and every one of their couplings. You'd still have sources of error (from determining whether a particular act did or did not qualify as cheating, for example), but at least that's an error of interpretation, rather than an error of collection.

We haven't even addressed the really hard question yet, either: How big is the gap between the number of people who say they're religious, and the number who actually are religious? At least cheating is a quantifiable physical act. How on earth are you going to figure out what people think about God, when most don't even know themselves, and the answer can experience dramatic shifts within a person's life as they re-interpret their own experiences (using a thousand different sets of standards to do so, I might add)?

Looks like The Daily News is at it again:

Several sources told the Daily News Wednesday that Clemens had a relationship with Paulette Dean Daly, a former wife of champion golfer John Daly.

The sources said Clemens, a married father of four, arranged trips to Anaheim Stadium for Daly - the latest woman to emerge as an alleged Rocket flame - to watch him pitch forthe Yankees against the Angels.

I apologize for calling Kevin an idiot. That was unnecessary. And with that, I'm done with the discussion.

There's audio here of McCready appearing on a radio show. It's a few minutes long. They ask her about the Clemens story and again she oddly says that she "cannot refute" "the story," yet she won't discuss any details and won't confirm or deny it.

They ask her about the Clemens story and again she oddly says that she "cannot refute" "the story," yet she won't discuss any details and won't confirm or deny it.
Anything to keep her name in the news whilst she's in the recording studio.
If she laid out details and got Clemens to confess, then she's yesterday's news by tomorrow.
If she keeps the kettle a-roiling, then her name remains out in public and her upcoming release will get lots of free press.
Just one theory.

The latest comments from Hardin:

NEW YORK (AP)—Roger Clemens’ lawyer says he will talk with his client about whether to press ahead with a defamation suit following a wave of unpleasant publicity in the wake of reports linking the pitcher to numerous women.

“He’s getting pummeled,” attorney Rusty Hardin said Friday.

There hasn’t been any change in plans,” Hardin said. “Everybody keeps asking these questions. We’ll sit down and see what his views are.”

The decision on whether to drop the suit rests with Clemens.

“That’s always a decision the client has to make. That’s not the lawyer’s decision,” Hardin said. “I’ve never seen somebody get beat up like this. In some ways, I think we’re on uncharted ground.”