There have been various times here where I have taken on articles that fall in the category of "science journalism" and usually have headlines such as "women prefer good looking men." Headlines designed to remind the public that essentialism never died and despite common sense and clear evidence to the contrary, so and so study proves otherwise. So last week, I made the choice to ignore the headline, "He's Happier, She's Less So." I didn't know where to start and comments around the sphere were just too annoying.
Lucky for me a reader was on it and sent me a blog run by linguists that broke it down!
OK, everybody, take a deep breath and listen: THERE IS NO HAPPINESS GAP!Every year since 1972, the General Social Survey has been asking a big demographically-balanced sample of American men and women "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Are you a) very happy, b) pretty happy, c) not too happy."
Neither in 1972 nor in 2006 was there any statistically significant difference between men and women in the distribution of their responses! And in both 1972 and 2006, the proportion of women who said "very happy" was a little bit higher than the proportion of men who gave that response (though again, in neither year was the difference distinguishable from chance fluctuations).
So what is everyone talking about? Well, some economists fit a complicated statistical model (called an "ordered probit") to the whole sequence of survey results from 1972 to 2006, and this analysis suggests that women have become a little tiny bit less happy relative to men over that whole time period. But the effect is so small that you can't actually see it in the statistical analysis for any one year; the effect is much smaller than the amount of year-to-year jiggle. That's true even through the General Social Survey involves a huge sample, much bigger than is normally used for opinion polls: 4,500 people in 2006.
And then there's some as-yet-unpublished stuff about how the amount of time per week that men say they spend in activities that they find unpleasant has decreased by about 3.6% over the past 40 years, whereas the amount of time that women report spending on unpleasant activities has remained about the same. Since the data remains unpublished, it's hard to know what to make of this, but I'm betting that the between-group change is minuscule relative to the within-group variation, just as in the GSS analysis. If you want to read more about the research, check out this post and the link therein. For now, I'll just reproduce the crucial graph of GSS responses over time:
And all I can say is yes and yes.
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Samhita,
This is a great one for Brad DeLong's "Why or why can't we have a better press core?" complaint on his blog.
This sort of thing is frustrating on so many levels. In looking for the take-away line the journamilist (again to use BDL's wonderful moniker) doesn't read, think or try to understand.
There are some good science journalists. Check out "Quirks and Quarks" on CBC or The "Loh-down on science" on KPCC. NYT is usually good.
Chris
Language Log is almost always an excellent read, and I almost always come away knowing something useful or interesting.
Sadly, I doubt we'll see a turn around of People: Projecting Their Assumptions on Neutral Data headlines, but it would be nice.
Samhita, I agree with you completely that reporters (and sometimes scientists) try to overstate the importance of findings that reach statistical significance even if they don't have substantive significance. This is the reason scientists also rely on "effect size calculations" that show how big the effect is, not just whether it reaches statistical significance.
But, in reading the article, I don't see anything about essentialism, so I'm not sure why you are using this post to dismiss a huge field of study about how evolutionary factors have shaped physiological, cognitive, and emotional processes, including in ways that might differ between the sexes.
If you liked that one, check out this one--the linguist is actually quoted in the exerpt he links to. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004980.html
There's definitely a big problem with journalists and some scientists not understanding how to interpret data. The problem spans all sorts of fields (obvious examples: global warming deniers, perpetual motion claims, etc).
When the interpretation of data can be so subtle, how can its misuse be prevented? Most people don't spend much time thinking about the finer points of data analysis, and unfortunately much of the data that reaches the general public is filtered through political and commercial agendas. Maybe if more scientists started writing directly to a lay audience, rather than letting journalists interpret their findings.
Being a psych major, I have become very aware of what a correlation study is. Sadly it seems some of these vague headline genre of articles are in fact just that. People don't realize that correlation does not prove causation. Therefore, they end up reading these things and thinking they are hard facts when they aren't.
As a minor aside, but an example of poor science journalism, do you remember this news release about "slutty" Cheetahs?
http://feministing.com/archives/007102.html
Well I had the honor of meeting Dr. Gottelli at a conference in South Africa in June. She gave a fantastic talk, and her research was very different than that news article would have one believe. I ran into her at the conference social night in the bathroom of all places. (I swear, as a lady scientist, I have had my best and most memorable conversations with fellow female mentors/famous scientists in the line for the toilet.) Anyways, we had a brief discussion about how her research was represented in the media, and she knew exactly what articles I was talking about, apparently it had been a huge issue and my impression was that she was pretty pissed about the way her research was framed.
I think there is often a huge gap between what a scientist tells a journalist, and what the journalist thinks they hear based on their own presumptions of what "male" and "female" behavior should be according to their world view. It's totes lame, and as a feminist scientist, I'm getting really f*cking tired of it!
Would she do an interview at Feministing?