Journal the_mad_poster's Journal: Another BS "Study" (and responses to last JE comments) 12

Ah, yes. The RAND Corporation is to blame for this one.

It's not that I have reason to believe the study itself is bullshit, it's that the statements Rebecca Collins - the psychologist that headed the study - made in the CNN writeup of the study are obviously bullshit.

Here we go again with the brainiacs trying to tell us that these irrelevant comparisons really are something more than the nonsensical raving of biased "research" with a thin veneer of science painted over the results. They surveyed about 1800 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 and found - get this - that those youngsters who watch television shows containing more sexual content are more likely to be sexually active or initiate sexual encounters.

And, of course, in typical fashion, the bullshit is flying about the room so thick that there's just no way to dodge it.

Says Collins of the study: "This is the strongest evidence yet that the sexual content of television programs encourages adolescents to initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities".

Um. Excuse me? On what evidence do you base this conclusion? Did it ever occur to you that sexually active teenagers may find such shows more interesting because of their hieghtened sexual awareness? That's just as likely an explanation as the one you just gave, only mine seems to make more sense from a biological perspective, what with the hormones affecting mood, decision making, and interests.

Of course, she can't just stop here, and even though I just handed this degree-holding ape her ass on a shiny silver platter, I'm not going to leave it at that either.

"The impact of television viewing is so large that even a moderate shift in the sexual content of adolescent TV watching could have a substantial effect on their sexual behavior."

Uh. Huh. And, again, I ask this question: on what evidence do you base this conclusion? You can't just say "Ok, these kids in group A watch a lot of TV with sexual content, these kids in group B don't. The kids in group A have a higher rate of sexual contact, so the cause must be their TV viewing habits." That is absolutely ridiculous. First of all, why are the children who aren't watching the shows with sexual content watching other things? What is the environment that's pushing them away from sexually charged entertainment? What impacts have the parents had on each of the children involved in the study? How are the groups ordered socially? What is the class structure we're talking about here? What other precipating factors are involved - social interaction, any drug use, peer pressure? You have no evidence, based on this writeup, to be making these statements in anything more than a status roughly equivalent to a wild guess.

It saddens me to think that people are now so painfully oblivious to even the simplest whitewash that this sort of nonsense regularly makes it into the newspapers. Not long ago, it was a horrifically biased study "showing" a connection between drug use and teenage sexual activity. The "conclusions" being drawn from this study are even less disguised bullshit than the conclusions from the last one. Of course, Collins' own words hint at just how much bullshit this really is:

This is the strongest evidence yet that the sexual content of television programs encourages adolescents to initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities.

If that's the strongest evidence you have yet, then the only thing I can say is: well, obviously there's no issue here, so I'm going to give it exactly the level of concern it deserves. None.

Since I'm still banned from posting:

BandwidthHog: yes, that's me in the black shirt with the short hair. Now you can imagine that guy foaming at the mouth and flailing wildly around in his chair as he writes.

CyranoVR: Heh. Well... that's... cuz... one of them was actually the one doing the captions.