Take a look at this New York Times article:
"Poor Behavior is Linked To Time in Day Care"
Step 2: Read the fourth paragraph.
Step 3: Imagine the headline was:
"Stronger Vocabulary is Linked to Time in Day Care"
Step 4: Return to reality where day care can NEVER produce positive outcomes for any children, or women might not feel guilty enough for using it while they work.
Step 5: Reread the first three paragraphs which point out that any "poor behavior" is "well within the range for healthy children", and note that the people who seem to be most affected are "teachers who must manage large classrooms."
Step 6: Daydream about rewriting an article using this data to support cases for family and teacher-friendly policies, such as smaller class sizes, instead of an article designed to make working mothers miserable.
Step 7: Blog about the article and ask: what is your reaction to this kind of journalism?
3 comments:
I saw that article on MSN but stopped reading it after the first couple paragraphs. It was too contradictory for my taste.
This article just makes me want to launch into one of my standard rants about how innumeracy is endemic in both journalism and in "soft" science research (sociology, medical population studies, etc.). As you point out, it sounds like the authors are over-interpreting data that isn't statistically significant.
I was just reading a website in which the classic "who needs math besides scientists" came up. Well, here's your answer.
Or, I could launch into my other standard rant about how society seems to want to make mothers feel guilty about every aspect of child-rearing these days, but I'll spare you. :)
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