Category Archives: Sociology

The statistical calculations used for counting votes

Posted on by

Some might be surprised to hear that “Counting lots of ballots [in elections] with absolute precision is impossible.” Wired takes a brief look at how the vote totals are calculated:

Most laws leave the determination of the recount threshold to the discretion of registrars. But not California—at least not since earlier this year, when the state assembly passed a bill piloting a new method to make sure the vote isn’t rocking a little too hard. The formula comes from UC Berkeley statistician Philip Stark; he uses the error rate from audited precincts to calculate a key statistical number called the P-value. Election auditors already calculate the number of errors in any given precinct; the P-value helps them determine whether that error rate means the results are wrong. A low P-value means everything is copacetic: The purported winner is probably the one who indeed got the most votes. If you get a high value? Maybe hold off on those balloon drops.

A p-value is a key measure in most statistical analysis – it provides a measure of how much error is in the data and whether the obtained results are just by chance or whether we can be fairly sure (95% or more) the statistical estimation represents the whole population.

So what is the acceptable p-value for elections in California?

I would be curious to know whether people might seize upon this information for two reasons: (1) it shows the political system is not exact and therefore, possibly corrupt and (2) they distrust statistics altogether.

An emerging portrait of emerging adults in the news, part 2

Posted on by

In recent weeks, a number of studies have been reported on that discuss the beliefs and behaviors of the younger generation, those who are now between high school and age 30 (an age group that could also be labeled “emerging adults”). In a three-part series, I want to highlight three of these studies because they not only suggest what this group is doing but also hints at the consequences. (Find part one here.)

In Sunday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune, there was a story citing research that shows emerging adults are more tolerant than previous generations on issues like intermarriage, gay marriage, other races, and immigration. Yet, at the same time, there is also research suggesting levels of empathy among college students are down about 40% compared to the 1970s:

“Millennials, A Portrait of Generation Next,” an extensive study of teens and 20-somethings released earlier this year, showed that members of the Millennial Generation, generally born between 1981 and 2000, are “more racially tolerant than their elders.”

More than two decades of Pew Research surveys confirm that assessment.

“In their views about interracial dating, for example, Millennials are the most open to change of any generation,” the report states.

The study goes on to report that nearly 6 in 10 Millennials say immigrants strengthen the country, compared with 43 percent of adults ages 30 and older…

The problem is that tolerance doesn’t necessarily mean understanding, researchers say. Adults working with teens say they see an unsettling strain of desensitivity among young people.

In May, University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research issued a report on an analysis of 72 studies on the empathy of nearly 14,000 college students between 1979 and 2009. The result: Today’s college students are about 40 percent lower in empathy than students two or three decades earlier.

The researchers suggested that disheartening trend may have to do with numbness created by violent video games, an abundance of online friends and an intensely competitive emphasis on success, among other factors.

This is a very interesting conclusion: the younger generation is more tolerant but less understanding and empathetic. So what exactly does this tolerance look like? The lack of empathy, in particular, is interesting as it is another step beyond tolerance. Empathy is the ability to understand and take on the feelings and perspectives of others. Is tolerance the end goal or is there more that we should be striving for as a society?

This conundrum reminds me of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the current topic of our Sunday School class. In verse after verse, Jesus suggests that Christians aren’t just supposed to put up with people: “loving your neighbor” means taking an extra step toward people, bringing reconciliation, peace, and blessings to other rather than just letting them be or letting them pursue their rights in their own space. Loving people means putting them above yourself, something beyond both tolerance and empathy.

One outcome suggested by this story is a meanness or harshness among high schools. Teenagers understand about respecting difference but this doesn’t translate as well into personal interactions where being mean is seen as being cool.

Another possible outcome is living alone, keeping people at a distance. I will consider this in part three of this series.

Quick Review: The Cove

Posted on by

On the surface, The Cove is not a typical film that I would watch: a documentary about nature. But I found The Cove to be engaging. A few thoughts about this award-winning 2008 documentary:

1. The story follows the actions of Richard O’Barry as he tries to expose the slaughter of dolphins in a protected cove in Taiji, Japan. O’Barry’s backstory is very interesting: he was the trainer for Flipper but immediately switched sides to protect dolphins after one of the show’s dolphins died (he says she committed suicide) in his arms. O’Barry assembles a team of people to help expose what is going on in Taiji as some in that community attempt to stop him. To me, O’Barry is the heart of this film – his decision and actions to try to save dolphins shows remarkable dedication and stubbornness in the face of difficult odds.

2. It is hard not to like dolphins: they are intelligent and are graceful. But O’Barry suggests one part of their appearance that may work against them: they appear to humans to always be smiling and this masks the times when they are in pain or are suffering.

3. Why do whales and dolphins get all of this attention, both in this film and from zoo or aquarium attendees? There are plenty of animals that are mistreated and locked up. There has to be an interesting social history here.

4. One of the side plots in this film is Japan’s role in the International Whaling Commission. This international body has difficulty stopping Japan from doing anything. Again, this could be a whole story or film in itself: how Japan skirts international law and advisories to conduct whaling activities.

5. One strong point of this documentary is that O’Barry’s team actually attempts to do something (and it is set up like the plot of some action film) as opposed to documentaries where people talk the whole time and viewers are shown statistics.

Overall, I enjoyed this film: the fight against what happens in Taiji, Japan makes for an interesting tale.

(This film was highly rated by critics: it is 96% fresh at RottenTomates.com with 116 fresh reviews out of 121 total.)

How to get into clubs (the key: status)

Posted on by

Status is a topic that fascinate sociologists – who is labeled high status, why do they develop this, and how do they use it? A new study in Qualitative Sociology looks at what people are more likely to get into clubs:

Bring a woman — preferably many — if you want to get past the velvet rope.

That’s the advice of professor Lauren Rivera, who spent six months as a coat-check girl and in other low-level positions at an uber-exclusive club in Manhattan. The jobs were a cover for her academic work, on the bouncers of the club and the decisions they make. That account was just published in the journal Qualitative Sociology. It’s pretty much a how-to for making it beyond the velvet rope.

“I study status,” Rivera, an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, tells AOL News, “and I had a question. And the question I had was, How do people evaluate the worth of others in these unconstrained situations?'”…

Rivera began by flitting around the club, trying to steal looks at the bouncers in action. But a few shifts into her stay, she set up as a coat-check girl, which gave her an almost unencumbered look at the bouncers and who they were admitting. Later, she interviewed them all, delving deeper for the why of their judgments. “The interviews were actually more fruitful than the process itself,” Rivera tells AOL News.

Here’s what she found. Bouncers, first and foremost, let in the people they’ve let in before. “Generally, the most important thing is to be recognized,” she says, i.e. a star. If you’re not a star, it’s important to be a regular — maybe a friend of the star who goes to the club often, even when the star is, say, filming a movie in Antigua.

That still leaves the rest of us. How do we get in?

“Bring women,” Rivera says. “Women get in because the more women there are, the more men will spend money on them.” So if you’re a man, it matters less what you wear than who’s on your arm — or, preferably, arms. And if you’re a woman, never come alone. Always come during a massive girls night out.

After that, pinning down who’s admitted gets tricky and idiosyncratic.

Very interesting work. The bouncers had to develop methods for letting people in or keeping them out. The bouncers may appear to have an “instinct” about this but in reality, they develop and follow rules that they believe lead to a more successful club. While the above factors would increase the likelihood of getting into the club (being a regular, bringing women, being famous), there were also factors that would decrease your status in the eyes of bouncers: being an American black or Hispanic man.

Also, this research method of participant observation allowed Rivera to dig deep into the workings of the club. Without the initial observations from the inside of the club as an employee plus the interviews at the end where she could then ask the bouncers about their decision-making, the study would not have been so complete.

Watching social interaction in the bouncy castle/moon bounce

Posted on by

A New York Times parenting blog explores how children interact with each other in a bouncy castle/moon bounce. Within a short period of time, the interaction moves from pure mayhem to the forming of powerful tribes:

Initially, the children bounced in random joy. They screamed and flailed about. It was pure mayhem, only rarely interrupted by a call for a parent to “watch this” and “look at this.” There was little collaboration among the children at this stage…

For as the first wave of youthful energy burned off, the children settled down and started to recognize the other. They tentatively reached out, jumping together as they held hands. It was simple collaboration accompanied by squeals of delight…

Then came the teams. Neanderdad was surprised to see kids in his children’s age group start build alliances. Three or four tikes would bounce together and exclude the other kids from their area. Those kids would, in turn, form their own factions and stake out territory as well…

After the small teams came the bouncy tribes. As all the territory inside the Bouncy Castle became claimed, conflicts between teams developed.  As a result, smaller groups merged to make themselves stronger. This co-opting processing progressed until only two large tribes remained…

When things seemed be getting a bit too heated, Neanderdad and other fathers were forced to step in and break up the door monopoly and disband the teams. Interestingly, once the conflict was defused, the children on both sides suddenly seemed to lose interest in the Bouncy Castle.

What is most interesting to me is that these are young kids working through patterns of interaction. Very quickly, they band together and stake out territory. Is this a real life version of Lord of the Flies? Would this sort of behavior hold true across cultures? Where exactly do children develop this process?

Next time I see one of these moon bounces in action, I may just have to look more closely.

(An odd side note: the title of the blog post is “the sociology of the Bouncy Castle” while the second paragraph suggests the author is turning “an anthropological eye on child’s play.” Sociology or anthropology? Perhaps both – but this doesn’t help the perception among some that the disciplines are the same.)

An emerging portrait of emerging adults in the news, part 1

Posted on by

In recent weeks, a number of studies have been reported on that discuss the beliefs and behaviors of the younger generation, those who are now between high school and age 30 (an age group that could also be labeled “emerging adults”). In a three-part series, I want to highlight three of these studies because they not only suggest what this group is doing but also hints at the consequences.

Almost a week ago, a story ran along the wires about a new study linking “hyper-texting” and excessive usage of social networking sites with risky behaviors:

Teens who text 120 times a day or more — and there seems to be a lot of them — are more likely to have had sex or used alcohol and drugs than kids who don’t send as many messages, according to provocative new research.

The study’s authors aren’t suggesting that “hyper-texting” leads to sex, drinking or drugs, but say it’s startling to see an apparent link between excessive messaging and that kind of risky behavior.

The study concludes that a significant number of teens are very susceptible to peer pressure and also have permissive or absent parents, said Dr. Scott Frank, the study’s lead author…

The study was done at 20 public high schools in the Cleveland area last year, and is based on confidential paper surveys of more than 4,200 students.

It found that about one in five students were hyper-texters and about one in nine are hyper-networkers — those who spend three or more hours a day on Facebook and other social networking websites.

About one in 25 fall into both categories.

Hyper-texting and hyper-networking were more common among girls, minorities, kids whose parents have less education and students from a single-mother household, the study found.

Several interesting things to note in this study:

1. It did not look at what exactly is being said/communicated in these texts or in social networking use. This study examines the volume of use – and there are plenty of high school students who are heavily involved with these technologies.

2. One of the best parts of this story is that the second paragraph is careful to suggest that finding an association between these behaviors does not mean that they cause each other. In other words, there is not a direct link between excessive testing and drug use. Based on this dataset, these variables are related. (This is a great example of “correlation without causation.”)

3. What this study calls for is regression analysis where we can control for other possible factors. It would then give us the ability to compare two students with the same family background and same educational performance and isolate whether texting was really the factor that led to the risky behaviors. If I had to guess, factors like family life and performance in school are more important in predicting these risky behaviors. Then, excessive texting for SNS use is an intervening variable. Why this study did not do this sort of analysis is unclear – perhaps they already have a paper in the works.

Overall, we need more research on these associated variables. While it is interesting in itself that there are large numbers of emerging adults who text a lot and use SNS a lot, we ultimately want to know the consequences. Part two and three of this series will look at a few studies that offer some possible consequences.

Report on how US helped Nazis after World War II

Posted on by

A recently released report suggests the United States helped a number of Nazis after the end of World War II:

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible…

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

Even today, everyone can agree on one group of people who were evil: the Nazis. Yet it appears the relationship between the United States, the supposed moral victors in Europe in 1945, had a much more complicated relationship with Nazis than is typically thought.

This reminds me of a chapter by sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. In this chapter, Alexander detailed how the United States was able to claim the moral high ground after World War II – after all, the US had rid the world of both the evil Nazis and Japanese. But by the mid 1960s, the United States could no longer claim this high ground with questions about whether the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan had been necessary and Milgram’s experiment suggested lots of ordinary people were capable of evil.

How much more interesting information like this is buried somewhere?

The globalization of scientific research

Posted on by

A recent report from the United Nations suggests that while the West (and the United States, in particular) still dominate scientific work, other countries are gaining ground. Here are some of the measures from the UNESCO report:

In 2007 Japan spent 3.4% of its GDP on R&D, America 2.7%, the European Union (EU) collectively 1.8% and China 1.4% (see chart 1). Many countries seeking to improve their global scientific standing want to increase these figures. China plans to push on to 2.5% and Barack Obama would like to nudge America up to 3%. The number of researchers has also grown everywhere. China is on the verge of overtaking both America and the EU in the quantity of its scientists. Each had roughly 1.5m researchers out of a global total of 7.2m in 2007…

One indicator of prowess is how much a country’s researchers publish. As an individual country, America still leads the world by some distance. Yet America’s share of world publications, at 28% in 2007, is slipping. In 2002 it was 31%. The EU’s collective share also fell, from 40% to 37%, whereas China’s has more than doubled to 10% and Brazil’s grew by 60%, from 1.7% of the world’s output to 2.7%…

UNESCO’s latest attempt to look at patents has therefore focused on the offices of America, Europe and Japan, as these are deemed of “high quality”. In these patent offices, America dominated, with 41.8% of the world’s patents in 2006, a share that had fallen only slightly over the previous our years. Japan had 27.9%, the EU 26.4%, South Korea 2.2% and China 0.5%.

Even though the United States still dominates a number of measures, UNESCO concluded Asia is the “dominant scientific continent in the coming years.”

A couple of things are interesting here:

1. Even if jobs have left the United States for cheaper locales, the US still has advantages in scientific research. How long this advantage holds up remains to be seen.

2. These are just three possible measures of scientific output. Other ones, such as journal citations, could be used but this seems fairly effective to quickly look at several measures.

3. It is interesting to think about how science itself will change based on increased research roles in non-Western nations.

h/t Instapundit

Making big money in real estate in the online world

Posted on by

A number of stories in recent years have highlighted the increasing amount of real money changing hands in online games or environments. A recent example comes from the Entropia Universe where a gamer sold his property for over $600,000:

Take, for instance, what just went down on Planet Calypso, where one of Entropia’s wealthier players has sold off his interests in a “resort asteroid” for an eye-popping $635,000.

The seller is Jon Jacobs, also known as the character ‘Neverdie’. He originally purchased the asteroid in 2005 — eventually converting it into the extravagant resort ‘Club Neverdie’ — for the then-record price of $100,000. For those keeping score, that’s a gain of over $500,000 in just five years. In nerdier terms, that’s an ROI of 535%. Match that, Citibank.

And we’re not talking about Monopoly money here. Launched by Swedish developer MindArk in 2003, Entropia Universe features a real-world, fixed-rate currency exchange that works just like chips at a casino: players trade real cash for in-game funds called PEDs (Project Entropia Dollars), which can at any point be redeemed back for real, spendable cash — minus a transaction fee, of course.

Jacobs was making money from the get-go, however, having earned back his initial hundred-grand investment in just eight months. How? By selling rights to hunt and mine on the asteroid, as well as selling off bits of real estate. He worked it much like any real world landlord, really, but with a lot less red tape and a lot more graphics.

With that kind of a return on investment, will more people flock to these realms to make money? How many people in the world make a steady income based on online gaming?

There has to be a good sociological study being done out there about these types of transactions…

Losing a data source: the white pages of the phone book

Posted on by

A number of phone companies have recently made requests of states that they stop publishing white pages. With this information available online and few people using the thick phone books, it looks like the phone book is on the way out. We might say “good riddance” but then briefly reflect on the usefulness of residential phone listings as data sources:

If the white pages are nearing their end, then Emily Goodmann hopes the directories would be archived for historical, genealogical or sociological purposes.

“The telephone directory stands as the original sort of information network that not only worked as kind of a social network in a sense, but it served as one of the first information resources,” said Goodmann, a doctoral student at Northwestern University who is writing her dissertation on the history of phone books as information technology. “It’s sort of heartbreaking … even though these books are essentially made to be destroyed.”

Particularly in studying communities in the late 1800s and early 1900s, phone listings can be an important source of data. In fact, they may be the only common source that lists a majority of residents.

(Interestingly, the article also notes that the Yellow Pages are doing just fine – and will continue to be printed.)