A scholarly controversy in progress

A relatively high profile academic controversy has arisen around the publication of a recent paper in Social Science Research called "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study". The author, Mark Regnerus, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Here is the paper's abstract.

Abstract
The New Family Structures Study (NFSS) is a social-science data-collection project that fielded a survey to a large, random sample of American young adults (ages 18–39) who were raised in different types of family arrangements. In this debut article of the NFSS, I compare how the young-adult children of a parent who has had a same-sex romantic relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional, and relational outcome variables when compared with six other family-of-origin types. The results reveal numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married (heterosexual) biological parents. The results are typically robust in multivariate contexts as well, suggesting far greater diversity in lesbian-parent household experiences than convenience-sample studies of lesbian families have revealed. The NFSS proves to be an illuminating, versatile dataset that can assist family scholars in understanding the long reach of family structure and transitions.

Response to this paper has been highly charged, even in the academic community. I have not tried to follow it all, but expect it would be interesting for some of you to explore. For a few entry points, you might read these two opposing columnists from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The first, Laurie Essig, points out weaknesses in the article and calls into question its intentions. In a second essay, Essig generalizes her critique, stressing that research is not made more objective simply through application of larger data sets.

The second, Peter Wood, generally defends Regnerus, especially endorsing the usual scholarly process, rather than special administrative investigations, as the right way to criticize work like this.

Regnerus himself wrote less formally about this in Slate.

Since we will have Al Young, the Chair of the Sociology Department with us on Thursday, I thought some of you might want to take a look at all this and discuss it with him.

Whatever is going on here (and I truly don't know), it is an example of the complexity which can emerge from research on topics of current social and political interest.

A Visual Stimulation

Here's an impressive graph by Brendan Griffen showing how people have influenced each other through the ages. According to the creator, the data comes from anyone with a Wikipedia page that contains an "influenced by" heading. The colors are:

• Red – 19th/20th century philosophers
• Green – antiquity & enlightenment philosophers
• Pink – enlightenment authors
• Yellow – 19th/20th century authors (~fiction/philosophy)
• Orange – fiction authors
• Purple – comedians

A useful tool, perhaps, as we near the end of the summer

Hey Everyone!


As we're starting to get near to the end of the summer, I'm beginning to think about a task Lisa Young, the undergraduate thesis wonder woman for archaeology, set to me and the others in my cohort: drawing out a concept map for our projects. 


Here's the description of the task, from Lisa herself:


Put a general word or phrase that sums up your research topic on one side of the paper and a word or phrase that summarizes the type of information you are collecting at the other side and write down all the concepts and/or references that you think will be important to connect them.  Think about how you will justify why your case studies are important for answering the research question(s) you are developing and why the research is important in the area where you are working.  This concept map is meant to be useful for you so you can organize it in whatever way helps you think about the connection between your general research questions and your data – think connection is one of the difficult aspects of archaeology and research in general.


I thought I'd share this idea with everyone because I like thinking visually and I'm assuming others do to, and I anticipate this being a useful tool in terms of summing up what research I've done so far for my project and where the holes are that I still need to fill in. 


I thought it would maybe be cool (if other people are interested in this) to post our concept maps on the blog once created to see how others are conceptualizing their research, theories, and general project. It might be an interesting experiment in the efforts of interdisciplinarity. Just a thought. 


See y'all soon!

Resources for Social Sciences

Here is a link to some potential resources, geared for the social sciences. Hopefully it will be of some use to some of you! In particular, the first link on the page about proposals is particularly useful to all of us as we begin writing our proposals.

http://www.gradschool.umd.edu/Writing_Resources/Colleges/Social%20Science%20Resources.html

Two theoretical/statistical questions about directions of correlations, forgive my statistical ignorance, I really need help!

1. When I search for relevant articles to support my arguments, I often come across correlational studies. Often, the correlations found from regression models seem non-directional (e.g. life satisfaction and self-esteem can influence each other bidirectionally) but the articles often base their discussion on one direction of the correlation (e.g. life satisfaction can be predicted from self-esteem). Would it still be appropriate to cite the same study in support of "self-esteem can be predicted from life satisfaction"?
2. Can a longitudinal design really eliminate the plausibility of having a correlational conclusion in a direction opposite to your prediction? This is what I found in one article, but it seems like most people assume the directions of certain correlations without doubt, especially if it is based on longitudinal studies. "On a more general level we believe that there are three common, important and less widely recognized misunderstandings with respect to longitudinal study designs in occupational health psychology. The first of these is that we can prove causality by using longitudinal study designs. The extent to which causal inferences can be made depends on the following four conditions: temporal ordering of the focal variables, the strength of the statistical association between them, theoretical plausibility of the presumed causal relationship, and exclusion of plausible rival hypotheses for this relationship (2, unpublished manuscript by de Lange et al). While the first three conditions are relatively easy to satisfy with a longitudinal design, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that particular associations are due to variables that were not measured in the study design. Thus we can never prove causal relationships; the best we can do is argue that it is plausible that certain statistical associations can be understood in causal terms." 

Higgs Boson Explained in Animation!!

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1489

A Comic about Research.... very fitting

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1506

Jennifer has her finger on the literary pulse...

After all our talk about Sebald today, I come home to find this link to a new National Review Article about W.G. himself. Jennifer, it's clear your chosen topic is in the public eye. I do hope that by the end of the summer you will give us a few suggestions for Sebald things we should read.

This article is a review of a new volume of Sebald's collected poems: Across the Land and Sea. I'm afraid this reviewer finds his prose better than his poetry...some of which is very obscure - "something like reading “The Waste Land” without the notes".

I remember reading, in college, Wolfgang Borchert's play The Man Outside. A story of the impossibility of returning home after war, I found it very moving at the time. There is a beautiful, quiet US film on the topic called "The Best Years of our Lives" which is well worth seeing.

News from Around the World

I'm always looking for new avenues of acquiring news from around the world and am especially interested in finding and learning from different perspectives. I was very excited to learn from Cydney about Watching America. It's a site that translates articles from other languages into English so readers can form an understanding of how the rest of the world is seeing us. Cool right? I wish I knew more languages so I could simply reading them from source, but this is the next best thing. Even better, Cydney has recently began translating for the site! Check her out: http://watchingamerica.com/News/165592/follow-the-money-2/

Higgs Boson Evidence

Higgs Boson Evidence on Science Friday

What Higgs Boson evidence actually looks like! :)

"whimsical organisms"

A little fusion of poetry and science:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/07/06/mary-e-harrington-science-poetry/

About the media's influence...

One of my favorite webcomics is PhD Comics, created by Jorge Cham, who spends half of his time as a researcher at Caltech and the other half traveling the world, promoting his comics (quite an interesting career; I believe he spoke at Michigan last year, but I unfortunately found out too late). The comics depict the ups and downs of grad student life in hilarious ways, and having been involved in research throughout undergrad, I find it to be frightfully accurate. Talking today about the media's influence made me recall this amusing piece.

Here's a link to his most popular comics, some of which I will never tire: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/most_popular.php 

A Map of a Literary Genre

Having somewhat narrowed my topic, I thought I'd share this amazing map not only because it's fascinating, but also to try and show you the exact moment in the history of speculative fiction on which I'll be focusing my thesis. The name of the artist who drew the map is Ward Shelley, and he drew it in 2009. I'd personally call it a History of Speculative Fiction, as it includes the incipient Fantasy and Horror genres in its focus on SF.

The History of Science Fiction

The main obstacle I've encountered so far in my research has been the fact that I'm interested in basically every genre, sub-genre, and title featured in this graphic, plus some. But having focused my project on early lunar travel narratives, I can orient myself on the map in the upper left corner near "Pre-Scientific Imagination" - some of the texts on my reading list appear there, such as Johannes Kepler's "Somnium," Francis Godwin's "The Man in the Moon," Cyrano de Bergerac's "Empires of the Moon," and Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World."

I find this map to be awesome not only because of the impressive graphic design (I wonder how many drafts it took the artist to produce the final image), but also because of the level of informational detail the graphic goes into. Some may find it overwhelming, and frankly, I'm among them, but I see this complexity as a positive thing, a testament to how organic a literary genre can be as it evolves over time and why genres as a phenomenon are worthy of study.

Randomness + Procrastination --> Korean Hip Hop Culture Facebook Phenomena

I currently have the book "The Rhetoric of Soft Power" sitting on my lap, since I was about to begin transcribing the notes I took in it with sticky notes last night to my Evernote files. However, I am unsurprisingly on Facebook and news about the release of a new album by one of my favorite Korean hip hop artists, Beenzino, has been flooding my news feed. I am definitely frustrated waiting for someone to illegally upload it so I can listen to it (since, as a non-citizen, I can't buy Korean mp3s online legally and I'd have to have a friend buy the physical CD for me from Korea which would take at least a month...so annoying). But rather than complain more, I'm just going to productively procrastinate and get some free-flow writing out there, by discussing a really interesting phenomenon in the online Korean hip hop scene.

The album cover which has been staring at me teasingly for the past week from my Facebook News Feed.  

If I read one more comment/status saying "Are you guys listening to 2 4 : 2 6 right now??" I'm gonna punch someone. 

Anyways....... ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ (<-- 'hehehe' in Korean)

The main story:

Koreans (at least those who have been in Korea all their life, i.e. excluding international students) generally began adopting Facebook only last summer. Before, they had used a Korean SNS website called Cyworld. When Korean hip hop artists first began using Facebook, even though they are semi-famous, they added people to their personal accounts -- my suspicion is because they didn't know about the Fan Page feature. This resulted in many of them getting thousands of friends who are mainly just fans. (More recently, these artists have made traditional Fan Pages, but they still add/keep friends on their personal pages, too.) This has encouraged very close fan-artist relations in the Korean hip hop scene, and fans are very eager to support their favorite artists.

In particular, screen capture technology combined with tagging technology has resulted in a new fan phenomenon. Before an album comes out, fans will post the album cover as a picture on their page, and tag the artist in the photo, so the artist is aware that the fan is supporting them. Then, when the album has come out, fans will take screen captures of their smart phones, showing them in the middle of listening to the song. They then tag the artist in the screen capture. Here is what it ends up looking like on my News Feed:

Comments like this don't make me any less excited and anxious to listen to it!!!! But is it exaggeration to impress the artist? Who knows.... It's Beenzino though, bound to be dope! 

It's also not just that a few fans do this.... a lot of fans do it. To show, I went to Beenzino's personal page, and looked at the photos of him tagged. This is what I found....

Yup. That's right. 45 tags of people supporting his new album. And I'm sure there are more to come. It's only been out for a few hours as of now.

The interesting point to all of this is that fans don't merely want to share their favorite artists to their friends, but they also want to prove their fandom and dedication by showing the artists exactly what they are doing to promote them. In addition to fans  loyally spending money on going to concerts every weekend (which they do -- I saw it happen) and buying albums, they must now also VISIBLY show this support. Conspicuous consumption to be sure, but not only conspicuous consumption to prove their identity or status to their peers, but to the  people creating the products to be consumed as well.

Traditionally, conspicuous consumption of name brands, for example, is to show status mainly to peers. "I wear Chanel and thus I am more sophisticated and wealthy to you." Of course, this is a big world, and the people at Chanel have no way of knowing that You wore their products. All they see is revenue.

However, the relative smallness of the Korean hip hop community and the adoption of Facebook has allowed for conspicuous consumption which serves to solidify social relations between artist and fan. It is no longer merely enough to enjoy the music. To be a TRUE fan, you must wear your support on your sleeve, both for your peers and the artists themselves.


_____


So yeah. This is a really interesting topic to me, because it personally relates to my life. I, too, have certainly taken advantage of the opportunity to tag my favorite artists in my posts. For me, it is mainly because I want them to know that I appreciate the music they make. But it may be different for Koreans who have more peers who like Korean hip hop, and more strict Confucian mores guiding them. I'm also interested in learning what the artists think of this, and if it even makes a difference in their opinion of their fans? Also, does the nature of hip hop encourage a greater or particular intensity of fandom? 


Gosh..... I kind of want to make this into my thesis topic now since it's not so overwhelming compared to my other one. Hmmm.... we will see. ^^ 


Good studying to everyone..... and wish me luck that the album will come out on Youtube soon!!! hehehe I will post it for you to enjoy! 


Lyndsey~~ 

Becoming a 'Stylish' Writer

http://chronicle.com/article/Becoming-a-Stylish-Writer/132677/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en