Friday, December 14, 2007
"Sociology" and "science" should never be used in the same sentence, unless the sentence is "Sociology is not science."
In today's WSJ (I will link when Rupert makes it free), we are told:
When you design a study that investigates something obvious, the results should not be a surprise. In other words, the fact that you are shocked, is shocking.
Also, your study was poorly designed. The survey only asked about how much money potential spouse had. People don't make financial decisions based on this alone -- they base it on physical and human assets (i.e. your job or schooling). It was only 50 years ago that Milton Friedman described the Permanent Income Hypothesis, which you might know about if you hadn't spent all of your time in sociology classes, bugging people who were actually studying to take your ridiculous class surveys.
I can't wait until the results of her next study. "Men wearing hospital scrubs or lab coats in their JDate profile pictures have better results than those wearing McDonald's uniforms." Shocking!
In today's WSJ (I will link when Rupert makes it free), we are told:
Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were "very" or "extremely" willing to marry for money. The answers varied by age: Women in their 30s were the most likely to say they would marry for money (74%) while men in their 20s were the least likely (41%).Pamela, Pamela, Pamela...
"I'm a little shocked at the numbers," says Pamela Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who has studied marriage and money. "It's kind of against the notion of love and soul mates and the main motivations to marry in our culture."
When you design a study that investigates something obvious, the results should not be a surprise. In other words, the fact that you are shocked, is shocking.
Also, your study was poorly designed. The survey only asked about how much money potential spouse had. People don't make financial decisions based on this alone -- they base it on physical and human assets (i.e. your job or schooling). It was only 50 years ago that Milton Friedman described the Permanent Income Hypothesis, which you might know about if you hadn't spent all of your time in sociology classes, bugging people who were actually studying to take your ridiculous class surveys.
I can't wait until the results of her next study. "Men wearing hospital scrubs or lab coats in their JDate profile pictures have better results than those wearing McDonald's uniforms." Shocking!
