Everyday Research Methods

The rich are different....and not in a good way

This article on msnbc.com presents a summary of research by Dr. Dacher Keltner on differences in empathy and social reasoning between upper- and lower-class Americans.

How does the evidence support the view that rich
folks, like Mr. Potter here, are less sensitive to others?
Photo: RKO Radio Pictures/Photofest

1. The article describes several studies from Dr. Keltner's and other scientists' labs. Give three distinct examples of studies described in the article. Do these studies represent replications of each other? If so, which kind? (direct replications, conceptual replications, or replication-plus-extensions? See Ch. 13). Do you think these studies constitute a "literature" on social class? Why or why not?

2. If you have access to a university's library, you could look for the original article in Current Directions in Psychological Science that the journalist is summarizing. Does the journalist do a responsible job representing the original article? What, if anything, does the journalist leave out?

3. One example from the article describes this result:

"In video recordings of conversations, rich people are more likely to appear distracted, checking cell phones, doodling, avoiding eye contact, while low-income people make eye contact and nod their heads more frequently signaling engagement."

Can you picture how the above study might have been conducted? How might the data set have been set up? (See Chapter 7 for ideas). How was the distraction variable in this study probably operationalized? What questions can you ask about this measure's construct validity? What do you think about this measure's face validity as a measure of distraction?

4. In this quote, Dr. Keltner presents an example of a mediator:

"Unlike the rich, lower class people have to depend on others for survival, Keltner argued. So they learn “prosocial behaviors.” They read people better, empathize more with others, and they give more to those in need."

Following examples from Chapter 8 in the text, how might you sketch this mediation path? What four steps would Dr. Keltner have to follow in order to support this argument?

Poll on the Tea Partiers: August 2011

Recently, two political scientists wrote an essay in the New York Times explaining some polling data they had collected on the Tea Party political group in the United States.  

Here's one of the claims in their article: 

"Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent."

a.  What kind of claim are the authors making here?  What questions should you ask to interrogate it?

Here's another set of statements from their article:  

"Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. ..

b. What does the phrase "representative sample" mean here?  Is a sample of 3,000 Americans large enough to make a sample representative?  

 

And finally, here's one more set of statements to consider: 

"We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant....

"...Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today."

c. In the first part of the quote above, what does it mean when the authors state that they can isolate one factor while holding others constant?  What kind of analysis does this suggest that the scientists did?

d. In the second part of the quote above, notice that they use the phrase "single strongest predictor."  Using what you learned in Chapter 8, can you imagine what the regression table might have looked like?   (List what the dependent variable was, and what some of the independent variables were, given your reading of the article, and suggest how the results might have supported the claim above.)

 

Suggested answers:

a.  As a frequency claim (about the level of support for the Tea Party among Americans) you should focus on external validity and construct validity in your questioning.  

b. A representative sample is one that was drawn using a random sampling technique.  Because the sample is representative, a sample of 3000 is large enough--it's how the sample is drawn, not how many are in it, that matters for external validity.

c.  This means that the authors probably used a multiple regression technique (see Chapter 8).

d.  We'd have to get more detail on the statistics to be sure.  However, according to this essay, the dependent variable is support for the Tea Party.  The independent variables seem to have included past Republican affiliation, support for religion in the government, suffering economic hardship in the past four years, being white, support for immigrants, and support for abortion, among others.  The statement in question probably means that the beta for Republican affiliation was the strongest one  (Later statements in this essay--those in the 10th paragraph--seem to indicate that support for religion in the government is the second strongest beta in the regression table.)

Which coping strategy do people use?

When you're experiencing a stressful event, how do you cope?

Do you distract yourself, or do you tell yourself the event is not that bad after all?  

This article describes a study that tracked people's preferred coping strategies. 

1. This is a factorial design.  What are its independent and dependent variables?  For each IV, indicate whether it is between-subjects or within-subjects.  
2. Sketch a graph of the study's results (remember to put the DV on the y-axis).  Depending on when you're reading this, you may be able to look up the published paper in your university's library.  Do the authors graph their results the same way you did? 
3. What do you think:  Is there an interaction in these data, or not?  (How can you tell?)

Participants in the study sometimes viewed stressful images like the attacking snake on the top.  The garden snake below is an example of a less stressful condition.  How would you cope with images like these? (Photo:  Shutterstock)

How much time do caregivers spend?

The Gallup organization published the results of a recent poll on caregivers.

The poll used a sample of people who are caring for another person in their family.  It reported that most of them (7 out of 10) are taking care of a parent or another elderly person.  The report indicated that caregivers spend on average 13 days per month running errands for the person and 6 days per month helping the person eat, dress, bathe, or do other personal care. 

Questions about the story:

1.  How did Gallup find and sample these caregivers?  Do their methods mean that the results are generalizable to most American caregivers?  

2.  How might you assess the construct validity of this poll?  

3.  How confident are you in concluding that about 36% of people who are caregivers in the United States are living with the person they are caring for?  

4. What's the margin of error on the 36% value?  (The one that refers to the proportion of people who are living with the person they are caring for).  How do you know?  

After reading the polling methods, can you say with confidence that most caregivers, like this New York woman, are caring for aging parents?

Photo: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times/Redux

 

Suggested answers

1.  The Survey Methods section indicates that Gallup re-contacted people they had polled the year before and who happened to have self-identified as "caregivers."  Since almost all of Gallup's polls are conducted on probability samples, this means that the caregivers themselves were presumably selected from a random sample of Americans originally.  They were then recontacted to participate in the present poll.  This means that the sample used is probably very close to a probability sample of American caregivers.  (Of course, some of the caregivers may not have been willing to participate the second time, or may not have been reached the second time, which could bias the sample in some way.)  All in all, this sample seems reasonably generalizable. 

2.  It is difficult to assess the construct validity of this poll because they do not include the question wording they used.  Therefore, it's hard to evaluate how well they measured their variables.

3.  In my opinion, this is probably a good estimate.  First, the sample seems fairly representative (see #1, above).  Second, it seems that the construct of living with the person they are caring for is a rather simple, behavioral question to measure.  Its construct validity is likely to be good.  (But of course, it would be best to see the actual question used.)

4.  Looking in the Survey Methods section, you can read, "For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points. For smaller groups, such as full-time employed caregivers, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2.3 percentage points."  

This means that the standard error of the estimate is 2%.  So if you conducted the same poll using the same methods 100 times, 95 of the times the value (are you living with the person you are caring for?) will be between 34 and 38%.  

Incidentally, you can see that the standard error of the smaller groups (such as full time employed caregivers) is larger.  That's because there are fewer people in this sample.  The smaller the sample, the larger the standard error of the estimate. (See Table 6.1 in the text.)

An expert’s take on “online search”

Recently, Google’s Daniel Russell presented a talk on Search Literacy, a skill for the information age.  The 35-minute presentation is viewable on youtube as one of the GoogleTechTalks. 

Anyone who spends time searching for information online can benefit from this presentation.  Russell presents some tips for designing good searches and recognizing false or faked information.  Russell also presents psychological effects such as priming and fixedness, which influence how we interpret search results.  

See his presentation here. 

 

Daniel Russell of Google  (Courtesy Daniel M. Russell)