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March 22, 2006

Confused Americans for Truth - An Important Question About the Block Study

by Ferdinand T Cat

When newspapers write about a study whose results seemed a bit off, I try to find a copy of the actual study online so I can review the methods used. Sadly, this is not possible with the Block Study of politics and personal growth. This means that analyzing the study is somewhat similar to analyzing a George Clooney film: you can't tell how much is a result of errors in the original material and how much was distorted to make a more dramatic presentation.

So you see my problem with analyzing the Block study. Maybe Block knew what he was doing and the newspapers screwed it up. I can't tell. But I can tell that a lot of important information is missing from the news account.

For example, how do they tell the difference between liberals and conservatives? As I pointed out in an earlier article, political alignment tests designed by liberals are frequently based on a total misrepresentation of conservative beliefs. There's no question that this total misrepresentation is at the heart and soul of the newspaper article, because it says this:

The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

The newspaper article makes a big point out of the fact that there could not possibly have been political bias when they were measuring the whininess, but it is completely silent on what kind of bias might have influenced the collection of data about who grew up into what. If that data is biased, the whole study is worthless.

There are no numbers, statistics, or other hard facts in the newspaper article, so we have no way of knowing how strong the correlation is between behavior at 3 years of age and political bias. Perhaps 52% of whiny kids are conservative and 48% of them are liberal. In addition, we don't know what the result would have been if the whininess value were computed at 6 years of age, or 9, or even 15.

It's also worth noting that the Block study sample set was only 100 individuals. While researching this post, Bruce and I came across this blog article about a study of talk radio listeners that is flawed because only 360 people were interviewed. After reading that article, I came up with this useful thought experiment.

100 opinion polls are conducted on small sample sets. Of these, 41 have results which match the expectations of the experimenters. The other 59 have results that don't make sense. How many of these polls will be written up in the science section of the local newspaper?

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat


# At Wed 11:59 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Confused Americans for Truth

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Comments

Try Michelle Malkin's site - she's got the complete study... :)


Posted by: Kari at March 23, 2006 12:37 PM

And she has some new info on where/how the study was done. They were all kids of UCBerkeley professors and staff!


Posted by: Harrison at March 23, 2006 10:50 PM

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