My favorite polling organization, Pew Research, has reported that people have become more and more likely to have "cell phones only," with no landline phones. Here is a graph showing the percentage of American adults who have cell-phone only households: Scott Keeter and Kyley McGeeney. “Pew Research will call more cellphones in 2015.” Pew Research …
Category: Chapter 06; Surveys and Observations
Observational research: What are parents doing?
Several press sources are covering a research article published in the journal Pediatrics, which observed parenting behaviors in naturalistic settings. Here's how the story was covered by ABCnews. The researchers visited a sample of fast food restaurants in the Boston area, found tables in which parents were sitting with kids, and made notes of the …
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Question wording matters
Chapter 6 discusses the importance of well-worded polling questions. When we look carefuly at the way questions are worded, we interrogate the construct validity of a poll: Is the question measuring what it intends to measure? My home paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ran a story on a recent poll last Saturday (right). It shows the results …
Malnutrition statistics in North Korea
This Wall Street Journal article describes how a team of U.S. and European professors traveled to North Korea to teach students there about quantitative methods for studying their population. North Korea, the story says, has "some of the least reliable statistics in the world." Please take a look at the pop-out map of North Korea …
More than half of US teens text while driving…
This recent story from msnbc.com reports that "nearly 60 percent of teens text while driving." From the story: An anonymous national survey conducted last year found that 58 percent of high school seniors said they had texted or emailed while driving during the previous month. About 43 percent of high school juniors acknowledged they did …
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Observing Temper Tantrums
Psychologists can study any interesting behavior! This story presents a video and interview with a researcher who studies temper tantrums in young children. Watch the video associated with the story, listening to the narration provided. The authors are describing the child's behavior at each stage of her short tantrum. This is an example of observational …
Most Americans report 2 friends
A report suggests that among Americans, the average number of close friends people report having is just two. You can read an msnbc report of the study here. The study reports that the researchers ...surveyed more than 2,000 adults ages 18 and older from the nationally representative Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) program. …
Tracking happiness on Twitter
A recent study used Twitter text to track people's moods throughout the day. Here's how the study was covered by wired.com. The journalist explained that: Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a text analysis program that quantifies the emotional content of statements, Golder and co-author Michael Macy analyzed a total of 509 million tweets generated …