Avoiding “vulgar sociologism” when responding to events like the London riots

Posted on August 27, 2011 by legallysociable

Responding to commentary from social scientists about the recent riots in London, an Australian sociologist warns against “vulgar sociologism”:

ARGUABLY the greatest poet of the 20th century, Wynstan Hugh Auden, is reported to have quipped that, the goal of anyone seriously interested in human affairs, should be to “never commit a social science”. As I am an academic sociologist, one could be forgiven for thinking, I might take offence at such a blanket dismissal of my stock-in-trade.

However, I think WH was right on the money. And, the media and academic commentary on the riots in London days has only added to my conviction that ‘vulgar sociologism’ – as the Peruvian sociologist Cesar Graña termed it – is much worse than no sociology at all. If only social scientists knew how to keep their ‘traps’ shut, from time to time…

As a result of such shortcomings, what often passes for social science or social commentary, especially in the public domain, is no more than cliché, thinly veiled moralism or prophecy based on hindsight. Like the Old Testament prophets, who emerged from the desert to proclaim that unless the people repented, more God-willed disasters awaited, these social scientists and social commentators seem to relish holding society responsible for humanity’s ills…

If the recent outburst of public sociological commentary is anything to go by, we can see why Auden counselled against ‘committing’ the sin of social science. Bad social science reduces complex problems to simplistic formulas. It only fills our newspapers, radio and television airwaves, with irrelevant commentary…

The truth of the matter is, that unlike medical research and the fight against diseases, social science is acting in bad faith if it promotes the view that it can seriously enhance a society’s capacity to avoid or solve social problems. There is no social science equivalent to prevention or cure; and even diagnosis is a sketchy practice.

A sociologist is really arguing that sociologist can’t help society deal with social problems? Isn’t this what motivates many to become sociologists and what use is research if it doesn’t apply to society? If sociology can’t diagnose, let alone prevent or cure, what is left? What exactly does this sociologist lecture on in class?

At the same time, I can see some merit in another idea in this piece: it is difficult to quickly describe and/or understand what happened in London. While I don’t know many sociologists looking for “simplistic formulas,” this is a reminder that social behaviors and actions are often the product of complex circumstances. Quick, accurate, and helpful pronouncements about complex situations on television are hard to come by, whether the field is sociology, politics, economics, or something else. As this sociologist notes, there is quite a temptation to respond quickly: academics may want to be in the public eye and can be rewarded for it. In a world of sound bites and Tweets, is it any surprise that academics may want to take part and claim some space for themselves?

In the end, I’m somewhat bamboozled by this essay. Cautions about rushing to judgment are helpful but the broader statements about the capabilities of sociology and social science are unique.

David Brooks: keep government funding for social science research

Posted on July 11, 2011 by legallysociable

Last Thursday, David Brooks made a case for retaining government money for social science research:

Fortunately, today we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real-world applications. Here’s one simple example:

When you renew your driver’s license, you have a chance to enroll in an organ donation program. In countries like Germany and the U.S., you have to check a box if you want to opt in. Roughly 14 percent of people do. But behavioral scientists have discovered that how you set the defaults is really important. So in other countries, like Poland or France, you have to check a box if you want to opt out. In these countries, more than 90 percent of people participate.

This is a gigantic behavior difference cued by one tiny and costless change in procedure.

Yet in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.

Here is what I think works in this column:

1. The examples are interesting and address important issues. I wish there were more people highlighting interesting research in such large venues.

2. The idea that a small research investment can have large results.

3. The reminder in the last paragraph: “People are complicated.”

Here is where I think this column could use some more work: why exactly should the government, as opposed to other organizations or sources, provide this money? (See a counterargument here.) Brooks could have made this case more clearly: there are a lot of social problems that affect our country and the government has the resources and clout to promote research. In certain areas, like poverty or public health, the government has a compelling interest in tackling these concerns as there are few other bodies that could handle the scope of these issues. Of course, many of these issues are politicized but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government shouldn’t address these issues at all.

Defining the poverty line in Indonesia

Posted on July 8, 2011 by legallysociable

One statistic that tends to generate discussion, including in the United States, is where to draw the poverty line (see a quick overview here). The issue is also drawing attention in Indonesia:

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), based on the one-dollar-a-day poverty line, there are about a million fewer poor Indonesians this year. The new BPS statistics released on Friday showed that the poor now constitute 12.5 percent of Indonesia’s population, down from 13.3 percent last year. BPS says this translates to 30.02 million poor Indonesians, as opposed to the 31.02 million in March last year. ..

BPS head Rusman Heriawan said this drop was recorded even though the government raised the poverty line to Rp 233,740 ($27.35) per capita per month from Rp 211,726 last year.

Despite the raised figure, the definition of poverty still worried experts. “The poverty line indicator is the minimum income for people to survive,” said Bambang Shergi Laksmono, dean of the University of Indonesia’s Social and Political Science Faculty.

Statistics are rarely just statistics: they are numbers politicians and others want to use to shed light on a particular issue. Here, the government wants to suggest that poverty has been reduced. On the other side, academics suggest there are plenty of people living in difficult situations and the poverty threshold doesn’t really doesn’t measure anything. Who is right, or at least perceived as right, will be adjudicated in the court of public opinion.

While it appears that the number in people living in critical poverty has been reduced, this is also a reminder that one needs to look behind claims of progress to see what exactly is being measured and whether the measurements have simply changed.

Why we need “duh science”

Posted on May 30, 2011 by legallysociable

There are a lot of studies that are completed every year. The results of some seem quite obvious than others, what this article calls “duh research.” Here is why experts say these studies are still necessary:

But there’s more to duh research than meets the eye. Experts say they have to prove the obvious — and prove it again and again — to influence perceptions and policy.

“Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,” said Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. “There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.”…

There’s another reason why studies tend to confirm notions that are already widely held, said Daniele Fanelli, an expert on bias at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Instead of trying to find something new, “people want to draw attention to problems,” especially when policy decisions hang in the balance, he said.

Kyle Stanford, a professor of the philosophy of science at UC Irvine, thinks the professionalization of science has led researchers — who must win grants to pay their bills — to ask timid questions. Research that hews to established theories is more likely to be funded, even if it contributes little to knowledge.

Here we get three possible answers as to why “duh research” takes place:

1. It takes time for studies to draw attention and become part of cultural “common sense.” One example cited in this article is cigarette smoking. One study wasn’t enough to show a relationship between smoking and negative health outcomes. Rather, it took a number of studies until there was a critical mass that the public accepted. While the suggestion here is that this is mainly about convincing the public, this also makes me think of the general process of science where numerous studies find the same thing and knowledge becomes accepted.

2. These studies could be about social problems. There are many social ills that could be deserving of attention and funding and one way to get attention is to publish more studies. The findings might already be widely accepted but the studies help keep the issue in the public view.

3. It is about the structure of science/the academy where researchers are rewarded for publications and perhaps not so much for advancing particular fields of study. “Easy” findings help scientists and researchers keep their careers moving forward. These structures could be altered to promote more innovative research.

All three of these explanations make some sense to me. I wonder how much the media plays a role in this; why do media sources cite so much “duh research” where there are other kinds of research going on as well? Could these be “easy” journalistic stories that fit particular established narratives or causes? Do universities/research labs tend to promote these studies more?

Of course, the article also notes that some of these studies can also turn out unexpected results. I would guess that there are quite a few important findings that came out of research that someone at the beginning could have easily predicted a well-established answer.

(It would be interesting to think more about the relationship between sociology and “duh research.” One frequent knock against sociology is that it is all “common sense.” Aren’t we aware of our interactions with others as well as how our culture operates? But we often don’t have time for analysis and understanding in our everyday activities and we often simply go along with prevailing norms and behaviors. It all may seem obvious until we are put in situations that challenge our understandings, like stepping into new situations or different cultures.

Additionally, sociology goes beyond the individual, anecdotal level at which many of us operate. We can often create a whole understanding of the world based on our personal experiences and what we have heard from others. Sociology looks at the structural level and works with data, looking to draw broad conclusions about human interaction.)

Explaining the continued drop in crime in 2010

Posted on May 25, 2011 by legallysociable

The FBI recently released preliminary crime statistics for 2010 and crime was down again. While this is good news for many places, scholars are left wondering what explains the drop:

Crime levels fell across the board last year, extending a multi-year downward trend with a 5.5 percent drop in the number of violent crimes in 2010 and a 2.8 percent decline in the number of property crimes…

“In a word, remarkable,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. In Fox’s view, the declines signify success for aggressive law enforcement and corrections programs and comprehensive crime prevention efforts. He said the crime levels could easily rise if the current environment of state and local budget cutting extends to law enforcement measures that are working.

Some experts are puzzled.

Expectations that crime would rise in the economic recession have not materialized. The size of the most crime-prone population age groups, from late teens through mid-20s, has remained relatively flat in recent years.

Whoever could provide a comprehensive answer to this this puzzle could attract a lot of attention. In my Introduction to Sociology class, I have my students read some about the prominence of the “broken windows theory” in the 1990s and the various commentators who think it does or doesn’t work. The people involved in putting that theory into practice in the 1990s, like William Bratton and Rudy Giuliani, rode that wave for quite a while. It is interesting to read Fox’s answer above: he seems to attribute the drop to “law enforcement measures.” Even here, there are multiple strategies in play. While communities might want a single factor or strategy that they could hone in on, crime, like many other social issues, is a complex matter with a lot of involved actors.

h/t Instapundit

The lack of variation in ordinal scales: color-coded terror alerts plus employee surveys and ratings

Posted on April 21, 2011 by legallysociable

In the last few days, I ran into a few stories that are related in unusual ways: they both concern a lack of variation in an ordinal scale. First, let’s start with the announcement from the Department of Homeland Security regarding the color-coded terror alert scale:

A government review determined that the five-tiered color-coded system instituted in 2002 had suffered from a lack of credibility and eroded public confidence. The color has not been changed since 2006 and has never gone below yellow, or “elevated,” risk. Setting the risk level to green, or “low,” was never even considered.

In the long run, the problem was that the scale didn’t change. Theoretically, there were five options but the alert was generally in the same place. Since the alert was always “elevated” or above, this was not helpful. (This also seems related to the argument some have made that a multi-decade “war on drugs” or “war on poverty” doesn’t make much sense because wars are supposed to have an end. Always being at war or on alert for terror erodes the sense of urgency.)

I also came across a human resources website that recommended businesses avoid five point scales regarding certain questions asked of employees:

A typical ranking, called a Likert scale, runs from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. And it’s fine for many psychological and sociological surveys. When you’re asking for ratings from 1,000 random people, you’ll get a wide variety of answers.

“But inside an organization, a 5-point scale loses its effectiveness,” Murphy says. “If you ask a group of employees at Acme Inc. to rate the statement, ‘Acme is a good place to work,’ you’re not going to get very many low responses (i.e., 1s and 2s). That’s because if you truly thought Acme was an awful place to work, you probably would have quit already.”…

But as with employee surveys, we don’t think 5-point scales are effective for performance evaluations. Many HR pros tell managers that only a very small percentage of their subordinates, say 10 percent, can be awarded the highest rating. And, managers are understandably reluctant to rate anyone as unsatisfactory—even when that’s the rating he or she deserves.

This is not just a hypothetical situation: I remember reading recently about the extremely high percent of teachers in a large district that were given satisfactory or higher ratings. (One group suggests that 91% of Chicago teachers in 2007-2008 were rated “superior or excellent”.) If the ratings mean anything and are actually measuring performance, it is difficult to believe that such a high figure is true.

The lesson to be learned here from these two cases? Be sure that there will be variation in responses if using an ordinal scale. Otherwise, the scale is quite unhelpful.

An example of fun solutions to social problems: speed camera lottery

Posted on December 1, 2010 by legallysociable

There are lots of social problems where it is hard to motivate individuals to support efforts to battle the problems or to change their individual behavior. But what if individuals could have a chance to benefit from the measures beyond simply the abstract “you’re helping society”? Some thinkers developed a lottery that might improve people’s views of speed cameras and reduced the number of speeding people on the road:

“Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do?” That’s a question Volkswagen recently posed in a public contest — and the winning entry was the Speed Camera Lottery, conceived by Kevin Richardson of San Francisco. Richardson’s idea, quite simply, is to build a better speed trap. Strategically placed traffic cameras will photograph all passing cars. Drivers exceeding the speed limit are sent tickets, while those obeying it are pooled into a lottery funded by the fines. Every now and then a randomly selected winner is sent a check.

The speed-limit contest was part of the Fun Theory, a program designed by Swedish advertising firm DDB Stockholm to make “seemingly baleful social challenges — environmental protection, speed-limit adherence, boosting public transportation ridership — enjoyable,” according to the Wheels blog of the New York Times. Other transportation-related innovations included the Wiki Traffic Light, which tries to get people to stop on red by fixing a screen that displays interesting facts, and the Piano Stairs, which nudges subway riders off escalators and onto the stairs by converting the steps into piano keys — ala the “Heart and Soul” scene from “Big.”

A demo of the Speed Camera Lottery enacted in Stockholm seems to have been a success. In collaboration with the Swedish National Society for Road Safety, Volkswagen installed a speed camera that showed drivers their speed. Over a three-day period the camera snapped shots of 24,857 cars. The average speed before the test was 32 kilometers an hour. During the test that figure dropped to 25 k.p.h. — a 22 percent reduction in speed.

My first thought upon reading this was that it is a clever way to deal with the issue of speeding. But, this could get complicated quickly. Where exactly is the trade-off point where people need to see that enough drivers who obey the law are benefiting versus the number of people who are receiving tickets? Such cameras have been particularly detested in the United Kingdom and the United States – would a program like this be enough to overcome these attitudes? More broadly, should people be rewarded for following laws or guidelines?

In general, we need more creative thinking like this. People generally don’t like to be told what to do, particularly if they feel that they are being scolded or that the state is just out to get them (or raise revenue). But if people can be convinced that they could tangibly benefit from following the law or fighting a particular social problem, perhaps more people would jump on board.

Where are the social scientists to explain the global warming debate?

Posted on November 17, 2010 by legallysociable

Amidst all of the political discussions regarding climate change and global warming, one social scientist suggests a sociological analysis of this public issue has been lacking:

But something is missing: academic explanations of why people flout reams of scientific conclusions, bristle at the notion of cutting carbon and regard climate change as a sneaky liberal plot.

“The social sciences are glaringly missing,” says Andrew Hoffman, an expert on the sociological aspects of environmental policies at the University of Michigan, for which he’s researching climate denial. “That leaves out critical questions about the cultural dimensions of both defining the problem and finding solutions.”

He provides unvarnished reasons for that. One concerns his colleagues’ dismissal of the conservative movement. They deny the deniers, he seems to say, by tending to “ignore the far right.” More broadly, social scientists — like sociologists, psychologists and communication researchers — are generally disengaged from public policy debates.

The story goes on to suggest that some research suggests that this debate may be similar to the debate over abortion: both sides attempt to frame the issue and then influence enough lawmakers to make their side heard. This seems like easy pickings for sociologists interested in social problems. Notwithstanding the science, how have both the supporters and skeptics’ movement been formed, framed, and publicized?

If this social scientist is correct, this means there are some real opportunities for sociologists to provide some overarching analysis of this important public debate.

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