Autism Vox
Common Sense
Developing Intelligence
Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge
Dr. X's Free Associations
Geek Buffet
Greg Laden's Blog
Jabal Al-Lughat
Lingformant
Literal-Minded
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
phonoloblog
Polyglot conspiracy
Providentia
Tenser, said the Tensor
The Omnibrain
The Phineas Gage Fan Club
In my brief career as a freelance travel & culture writer, I conducted a number of interviews. I had never been interviewed for anything real prior to just finishing a phone interview with a journalist who is considering writing about my birth order research.
Harvard being Harvard, many of my friends have been interviewed by multiple TV and radio shows, and there are periodically camera crews on my floor. But my lab's research is less media-friendly (no dancing parrots), it's not something we normally deal with.
I admit the experience is somewhat disconcerting. I expect my birth order research to be controversial. And while there is really no point in publishing something that is then ignored, the one advantage of being ignored is nobody's likely to send angry emails, feel I misrepresented their findings, or criticize the methods or conclusions. So while I do seek out publicity for these findings (hence the blog, and also an upcoming article I'm writing for a mainstream science magazine), success in achieving that publicity is at least as worrisome as failure. So we'll see how this goes...
Printer-friendly version
Comments
Be sure to tell us when the story is broadcast
August 7, 2009 by Fred Bortz, 15 weeks 2 days ago
Comment id: 43146
Be sure to tell us when the story is broadcast. Then we can join the fun when the controversy erupts.
As for me, I'd probably screw up your birth-order research. I am a second "only" child, having one sibling born 13.5 years earlier. I remember a little of her as "big sister" (and sometimes resentful babysitter), but she was soon off to college, at which point I was alone. I never had a sibling close in age, and I never had a real adult relationship with my sister until I was about 35, at which point it blossomed.
So am I more like the "baby" of the family, or more like an "only"? And what would you do with my data (if you had it) in your analysis?
Fred Bortz
Science Books for Young Readers
and
Science Book Reviews
dealing with age gaps
August 16, 2009 by coglanglab, 14 weeks 19 hours ago
Comment id: 44119
How we did deal with age gaps like yours was to ignore them. They just add variability, so they won't give us a false positive -- just weaken the effect.
Ideally, it would be nice to test whether the spacing of siblings matters. The data are harder to collect, though. In a survey method like what we used, we'd need people to list birth dates for all their siblings, and I suspect many people would be too lazy to do it!
I did try looking through Census data, but it was harder than you might think. The Census does not track individuals over time, so if somebody moves between one Census and another, you may never find them again. Since the only way to find out the ages of their siblings is to find the household in which they were born and track everyone born there...well, you see the problem.
It's likely that the relevant data set exists somewhere (I'd love access to college applications, for instance), esp. in Scandinavia, where they keep really excellent records about their populace. Unfortunately, I don't speak any Scandinavian languages.