The power of survey monkey

I'm doing a medium scale study of Child Welfare in West Virginia. My original protocol called for a mail survey of Child Protective Workers, Attorneys, and assorted support staff. Since the majority of these people now have access to the Internet at work, we decided to change the protocol to a web-survey.

This morning a link to the survey was sent out to all Child Protective Services personnel in the State. After 4 hours, I have approximately 25% of our anticipated responses in. Since we used a web-based data collection strategy, these responses come to me pre-coded and ready to analyze. In these 4 short hours, the $200 I spent for full access to Survey Monkey has more than paid for itself.

I am a fan of Survey Monkey.

2 Clarifications on Laud Humphreys

As I posted a few days back, the stories about Larry Craig have revived interest in Laud Humphreys' controversial book, The Tea Room Trade.

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Education (and Crooked Timber) offered a detailed book review of a recent Humphreys biography. Based on this review, I grabbed our library's copy of the book and read it Friday morning (minus the appendices, the book is about 100 pages). Two things presented in the biography struck me was being worth comment:

1. Alvin Gouldner assaulted Humphreys in retaliation for posting an unflattering posters portraying the professor as a bird that "feeds on underdogs." Humphreys told a New York Times reporter that he thought Gouldner's 1968 article in the American Sociologist, "was an unfair personal attack on leading exponents of what some term 'underdog sociology,' and an oblique attack on certain members of the sociology department at Washington University." Later in the Times piece we read, "Professor Gouldner, who called Mr. Humphreys a 'peeping parson,' contends that the altercation had been precipitated by the former clergyman's anger at his article."
   
   Ah, Sociology... You can't make this stuff up. But this confirms that I was wrong before; the stories of Gouldner beating up Humprheys for his "unethical research practices" do not hold water.
   
   
2. More interestingly, the biographers went to Humphreys's tearoom and examined the physical space. They conclude there is no way that he could have ascertained the detail of these encounters reported in his book as a non-participant observer. That is, he could not have observed the nuanced details of this ritual as a watch queen. This leads the biographers to conclude that he was engaged in as a participating observer.
   
   The biographers address the ethical implications of this, specifically that when Humphreys appeared to do his "survey", it's entirely possible that the subjects recognized him and felt compelled to answer his questions in fear of being outed. But there are some substantive implications as well. If he was an active participant in the tea-room trades, his work could be understood as normalizing advocacy. That is, an effort to communicate to heterosexuals that they should not fear this activity; that *we* have come up with ways to protect your innocence. Perhaps this is more wishful rhetoric than scientific reporting?

I haven't thought this through all the way yet, but it's an interesting question to follow. I know that advocacy research or participatory action research is popular within some areas of the field, but I have my reservations about it. I'll leave it at that for now. The only other impression I took away from the book was that Humphreys did not seem to be a terribly pleasant human being, at least to those he disagreed with.

Travesties of pseudo science, part 831

My institution puts out a daily email news brief listing developments of note around the campus. This came through today:

RESEARCH:

WVU economic study: Expenses for women can be higher in Morgantown According to the latest edition of the Morgantown MSA Economic Monitor, published by WVU's College of Business and Economics, the purchasing decisions that women make may lead to more expense than for their male counterparts in Morgantown. For example, the cost for a trip to the hair salon, pair of khakis, bottle of wine and dinner at home for one woman was $10.71 more than what the cost was for a barbershop haircut, dress shirt, six-pack of beer and medium pizza that a Morgantown man might choose.

Sigh...

I'm not sure which is worse:
(1) The stereotypical assumptions about "typical" men and women and their choices of consumption, or
(2) using stereotypical assumptions about "typical" men and women to make apples and oranges comparisons and then conclude that these assumed differences reflect reality.

I went to the actual press release that describes this "study" in more detail. It begins as a comparison study for cost-of-living index items. The economist gathered price data on 61 items items; the Morgantown prices can be compared to San Fransisco, New York, Pittsburgh, etc. That's valuable and important work.

But then....

Then, she took the comparison a step further by looking at the prices of items and services men might purchase compared to those women might buy.

Yeah, it costs more to go to Vavoosh's Salon than Jake's barbershop. I'll concede that. But on what basis do we assume that women are more likely to purchase a bottle of wine than beer, expensive khaki's over a dress shirt? And dinner at home over pizza? Moreover, what the hell went into that dinner at home? I've had dinner at a couple of female friend's houses here in Morgantown; I would bet that the total cost of the ingredients for the meal was approximate to the cost of a large pizza with toppings. Behavior can be observed and verified empirically. To project one economist's assumptions about how women and men might possibly differ in the consumptive behavior is flat out bad science.

Though they do have numbers.... so it must be truth.