media

You’re the Worst: The other show therapists should be watching

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Petr Kratochvil / PublicDomainPictures.net / Licensed under Creative Commons ZeroMental health groups have been paying a lot of attention to Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. The show depicts a teenager’s suicide and the tapes she left explaining her actions. Counselors and therapists have expressed concern that it will inspire copycats. But there’s another show that mental health professionals should be attending to, not out of concern but because it depicts mental illness and therapy so well: You’re the Worst.

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After reading this, you’re 250% more likely to understand odds ratios

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By aussiegall from sydney, Australia (30 Days of Gratitude- Day 15) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsOdds ratios give researchers eye-catching (and media-catching) results. They also rely on readers’ confusion about what they mean. They’re becoming fashionable in research and in media precisely because they are so eye-catching, but don’t be fooled by a weak finding dressed up to look like a strong one. Here’s a quick primer on how odds ratios work.

Let’s say I publish a book. Just for fun, let’s call the book America’s Cupcake Scourge.

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How to get the divorce rate wrong

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Do what a CNBC reporter did: Ask divorce lawyers.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Wedding ringsI’ve mentioned here in the past that estimates of the divorce rate are notoriously difficult to make well. There’s some inherent guesswork involved, unless you just wait for an entire annual cohort of marriages to reach either death or divorce. And that would take a long time. To simply compare a given year’s number of marriages with that year’s number of divorces is to compare different cohorts, making estimates of the divorce rate done that way wildly inaccurate.

Instead, demographers and social scientists do the best-educated guesswork they can based on past data and current trends. (Government data does not do forward-looking prediction, but rather focuses on divorces that have already occurred.) As new divorce-rate studies are released, you can keep up with them on the Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog. Reasonable people can disagree about the best scientific ways to determine the divorce rate, and there is probably some value to several different approaches. So news reporters, talking to scientists, will sometimes come up with different numbers, and that’s okay. They tend to wind up in that least the same neighborhood. (That neighborhood, by the way, projects the divorce rate for people getting married this year in the low 40s, percentage-wise.)

What is not okay — what shows rather extreme laziness in news reporting — is to ask a scientific question of someone who is in no place to answer it, and then not bother to check the accuracy of their statement. What’s even worse is when that person can directly benefit from providing misinformation.

So it went with CNBC.com in September, when reporter Cindy Perman opened her story about affairs (reprinted by USA Today) by providing an estimate of the divorce rate — a measurable, objective, scientific thing — helpfully volunteered by the director of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

The problems with this are so obvious that I’m stunned the article was printed. I don’t even blame the lawyer, at least not any more than I blame spokespeople from the National Association of Realtors for suggesting that any economic news, good or bad, means it’s a great time to buy a home. They’re lying, but that’s their job. I just wish reporters would subject those claims to actual scrutiny.

Like, fact-checking.

I’ll say it here again: The divorce rate in the US probably never got as high as 50%, and is currently declining. The best current estimates of the divorce rate place it in the low 40s, and the divorce rate is much lower for well-educated couples than for less-educated couples.

It’s a topic taken on quite well by Tara Parker-Pope in her book For Better, which dissects the science surrounding a number of elements of marriage and divorce.

Any time you see the lazy and wrong estimate that half of all marriages end in divorce, go ahead and — nicely — say something to correct it. I suppose as a couples therapist I might also benefit from inflating the divorce rate, but I’d rather let facts speak for themselves — and I think effective, widely-available therapy would bring down the divorce rate even further. It would save us all some money, too.

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If you know of egregious repeat offenders with the half-of-all-marriages-end-in-divorce nonsense, email examples to me at ben[at]bencaldwell.com, post a comment below, or send me a link to it on Twitter. Of course, other comments are always welcome.

Teen texting study an example of a researcher misleading the media

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A new study connects the texting habits of teenagers with drug use and other risky behavior. Contrary to media reports, the study did not show texting to cause the teens’ risk-taking.

Teenagers who send more than 120 text messages a day are more likely than their peers to engage in a variety of risky behaviors, including sexual activity, smoking, drinking, and drug use. That much we can agree on. It was the key finding of a Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine study presented this week.

Media coverage was predictably breathless:

But there is a big problem with each of the stories linked above. As compelling as these stories are, texting did not cause poor health or risky behaviors in this study. More precisely, the study did not show a cause-effect relationship. It found correlations — associations between certain behaviors that tend to rise and fall together. It did not say what causes what.

If we know that one behavior (texting, in this case) is more common among people who also do another behavior (let’s use drinking), then we can say the two behaviors are correlated. But that leaves at least three very different possibilities when it comes to cause and effect:

  1. Texting causes drinking.
  2. Drinking causes texting.
  3. Some other thing (lack of parental supervision, maybe?) causes both drinking and texting.

A correlational study (like this one) does not tell us which of those three possibilities is most likely (the third strikes me as by far the most plausible). And reporters understand that conclusions about correlation are not especially enticing news stories. “This one thing is related to this other thing, but we do not really know what causes either one of them” makes for a lousy article.

So reporters sometimes go beyond what a study actually shows, and pull a cause-effect relationship out of thin air. In essence, they pick their favorite out of the three possibilities listed above, and run with it. They do this in spite of a complete lack of data supporting their conclusion over the other cause-effect possibilities.

That seems to be what happened here. What is unusual in this case is the degree to which the study’s lead author actively promoted the made-up conclusion.

Even though the press release about the teen-texting study largely uses the right terms in describing the results (labeling behaviors as being “associated with” each other), Scott Frank, the lead author of the study, was remarkably cavalier in determining a cause-effect relationship his study did not demonstrate. He is quoted in that same press release as saying

“When left unchecked, texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers.”

The medical school where the study was conducted is also encouraging this unsupported conclusion. The link to this study from the Case Western School of Medicine home page currently reads “Hyper-texting and Hyper-Networking Pose New Health Risks for Teens.”

Frank’s promotion of a conclusion his own data does not support prompted an unusually direct rebuke from John Grohol, the CEO of PsychCentral, whose own site had reported on the study earlier. Grohol wrote that Frank’s conclusions about texting having negative health effects are (emphasis Grohol’s)

all pure crap. You could just as easily write the following headlines:

Teens Who Smoke, Drink Also Text a Lot
Outgoing Teens Like to Do Things Outgoing Teens Like to Do
Teens Who Enjoy Sex Like to Text Too!

Scott Frank, MD, MS should be ashamed of himself.

I’m with Grohol on this. For Frank to say that texting can have negative health effects is, as Grohol put it, “sloppy at best, and unethical at worst.” Frank is promoting a conclusion his study simply does not support. And some media outlets appear to be all too happy to run a story confirming parents’ worst fears about teenagers and technology, even when the story and the data do not match.

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In deference to my journalist friends, it must be noted that the examples of poor media coverage above are far outweighed, in both quantity and quality, by the many stories covering this study that ignored Frank’s quotes and reported his results accurately. Search “teenagers texting drinking” on Google’s news site and you will find far more headlines using phrases like “linked to” or “associated with” than you will find “causes.” Kudos to those writers (of both the stories and the headlines, since they are often not the same person) who understand the difference.