andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1305 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Sharon Jayson writes : The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings in several studies weren’t so clear-cut and may, in fact, be flawed. The newer analyses presented this week use analytical methods based on data from almost 130,000 adults around the globe — including more than 52,000 parents — and the conclusions aren’t so grim. They say that parents today may indeed be happier than non-parents and that parental happiness levels — while they do drop — don’t dip below the levels they were before having children. . . . The other study, of some 120,000 adults from two nationally representative surveys between 1972-2008, finds that parents were indeed less happy than non-parents in the d
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Sharon Jayson writes : The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. [sent-1, score-0.475]
2 But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings in several studies weren’t so clear-cut and may, in fact, be flawed. [sent-2, score-0.276]
3 The newer analyses presented this week use analytical methods based on data from almost 130,000 adults around the globe — including more than 52,000 parents — and the conclusions aren’t so grim. [sent-3, score-0.808]
4 They say that parents today may indeed be happier than non-parents and that parental happiness levels — while they do drop — don’t dip below the levels they were before having children. [sent-4, score-1.173]
5 The other study, of some 120,000 adults from two nationally representative surveys between 1972-2008, finds that parents were indeed less happy than non-parents in the decade 1985-95, but parents from 1995 to 2008 were happier. [sent-8, score-0.891]
6 This is consistent with my observation that happiness research is a mess. [sent-12, score-0.551]
7 Don’t get me wrong: I think happiness is very much worth studying. [sent-13, score-0.551]
8 Here’s a recent paper by Mikko Myrskylä, one of the researchers mentioned in the above article: The literature on fertility and happiness has neglected comparative analysis. [sent-18, score-0.853]
9 We investigate the fertility/happiness association using data from the World Values Surveys for 86 countries. [sent-19, score-0.325]
10 We find that globally, happiness decreases with the number of children. [sent-20, score-0.616]
11 This association, however, is strongly modified by individual and contextual factors. [sent-21, score-0.136]
12 Most importantly, we find that the association between happiness and fertility evolves from negative to neutral to positive above age 40, and is strongest among those who are likely to benefit most from upward intergenerational transfers. [sent-22, score-1.563]
13 In addition, analyses by welfare regime show that the negative fertility/ happiness association for younger adults is weakest in countries with high public support for families, and the positive association above age 40 is strongest in countries where old-age support depends mostly on the family. [sent-23, score-2.291]
14 The news article ends with the following comment: “The first child increases happiness quite a lot. [sent-24, score-0.655]
15 As a statistician, I hate hate hate hate hate when people ignore variability and present results deterministically. [sent-27, score-1.226]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('happiness', 0.551), ('association', 0.261), ('parents', 0.24), ('hate', 0.233), ('myrskyl', 0.197), ('adults', 0.177), ('fertility', 0.152), ('strongest', 0.139), ('scholar', 0.113), ('child', 0.104), ('surveys', 0.09), ('intergenerational', 0.09), ('globe', 0.09), ('countries', 0.089), ('levels', 0.086), ('weakest', 0.085), ('presented', 0.083), ('globally', 0.081), ('childless', 0.081), ('age', 0.08), ('marriages', 0.078), ('dip', 0.078), ('negative', 0.078), ('analyses', 0.078), ('neglected', 0.076), ('depressed', 0.076), ('comparative', 0.074), ('happy', 0.072), ('parental', 0.072), ('newer', 0.072), ('nationally', 0.072), ('upward', 0.072), ('findings', 0.071), ('positive', 0.071), ('sharon', 0.071), ('contextual', 0.071), ('neutral', 0.069), ('regime', 0.068), ('analytical', 0.068), ('support', 0.068), ('stylized', 0.067), ('younger', 0.067), ('decreases', 0.065), ('modified', 0.065), ('investigate', 0.064), ('importantly', 0.062), ('studies', 0.061), ('welfare', 0.061), ('variability', 0.061), ('happier', 0.06)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 1305 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-07-Happy news on happiness; what can we believe?
Introduction: Sharon Jayson writes : The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings in several studies weren’t so clear-cut and may, in fact, be flawed. The newer analyses presented this week use analytical methods based on data from almost 130,000 adults around the globe — including more than 52,000 parents — and the conclusions aren’t so grim. They say that parents today may indeed be happier than non-parents and that parental happiness levels — while they do drop — don’t dip below the levels they were before having children. . . . The other study, of some 120,000 adults from two nationally representative surveys between 1972-2008, finds that parents were indeed less happy than non-parents in the d
2 0.3776843 1360 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-02-Helpful on happiness
Introduction: Following on our recent discussion of contradictory findings on happiness, David Austin writes: A pellucid discussion of happiness and happiness research is Fred Feldman, What is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010). And here’s Feldman’s summary of his book.
3 0.32820493 486 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-26-Age and happiness: The pattern isn’t as clear as you might think
Introduction: A couple people pointed me to this recent news article which discusses “why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.” Here’s the story: When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure–vitality, mental sharpness and looks–they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility–the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness i
4 0.25783026 437 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-29-The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age
Introduction: For awhile I’ve been curious (see also here ) about the U-shaped relation between happiness and age (with people least happy, on average, in their forties, and happier before and after). But when I tried to demonstrate it to me intro statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U. So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton , who write: Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it. They write: What is the relationship
Introduction: Kaiser Fung discusses the following graph that is captioned, “A study of 54 nations–ranked below–found that those with more progressive tax rates had happier citizens, on average.” As Kaiser writes, “from a purely graphical perspective, the chart is well executed . . . they have 54 points, and the chart still doesn’t look too crammed . . .” But he also points out that the graph’s implicit claims (that tax rates can explain happiness or cause more happiness) are not supported. Kaiser and I are not being picky-picky-picky here. Taken literally, the graph title says nothing about causation, but I think the phrasing implies it. Also, from a purely descriptive perspective, the graph is somewhat at war with its caption. The caption announces a relationship, but in the graph, the x and y variables have only a very weak correlation. The caption says that happiness and progressive tax rates go together, but the graph uses the U.S. as a baseline, and when you move from the U.S
6 0.1891762 1887 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-07-“Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending”
7 0.18654291 706 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-11-The happiness gene: My bottom line (for now)
8 0.18082082 98 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Further thoughts on happiness and life satisfaction research
9 0.14891145 370 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-25-Who gets wedding announcements in the Times?
10 0.13761427 2141 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-20-Don’t douthat, man! Please give this fallacy a name.
11 0.12961553 991 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-04-Insecure researchers aren’t sharing their data
12 0.12740441 1996 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-24-All inference is about generalizing from sample to population
13 0.12479082 1715 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-09-Thomas Hobbes would be spinning in his grave
14 0.12078029 1204 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-08-The politics of economic and statistical models
15 0.1177495 416 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-16-Is parenting a form of addiction?
16 0.11250286 1688 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-22-That claim that students whose parents pay for more of college get worse grades
17 0.10996603 1793 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-08-The Supreme Court meets the fallacy of the one-sided bet
19 0.10500872 561 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Poverty, educational performance – and can be done about it
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.146), (1, -0.043), (2, 0.06), (3, -0.081), (4, 0.003), (5, -0.03), (6, -0.014), (7, 0.018), (8, -0.011), (9, 0.034), (10, -0.088), (11, 0.022), (12, -0.014), (13, 0.071), (14, 0.07), (15, 0.008), (16, 0.078), (17, 0.054), (18, -0.018), (19, -0.026), (20, -0.01), (21, -0.005), (22, -0.05), (23, -0.034), (24, 0.029), (25, 0.007), (26, -0.0), (27, -0.031), (28, 0.044), (29, 0.002), (30, -0.041), (31, 0.017), (32, -0.006), (33, -0.062), (34, 0.033), (35, 0.075), (36, 0.027), (37, 0.039), (38, -0.103), (39, -0.032), (40, -0.005), (41, 0.042), (42, 0.123), (43, -0.036), (44, -0.009), (45, -0.047), (46, 0.048), (47, -0.081), (48, 0.088), (49, 0.004)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96481472 1305 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-07-Happy news on happiness; what can we believe?
Introduction: Sharon Jayson writes : The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings in several studies weren’t so clear-cut and may, in fact, be flawed. The newer analyses presented this week use analytical methods based on data from almost 130,000 adults around the globe — including more than 52,000 parents — and the conclusions aren’t so grim. They say that parents today may indeed be happier than non-parents and that parental happiness levels — while they do drop — don’t dip below the levels they were before having children. . . . The other study, of some 120,000 adults from two nationally representative surveys between 1972-2008, finds that parents were indeed less happy than non-parents in the d
2 0.82294291 437 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-29-The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age
Introduction: For awhile I’ve been curious (see also here ) about the U-shaped relation between happiness and age (with people least happy, on average, in their forties, and happier before and after). But when I tried to demonstrate it to me intro statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U. So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton , who write: Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it. They write: What is the relationship
3 0.80641454 1360 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-02-Helpful on happiness
Introduction: Following on our recent discussion of contradictory findings on happiness, David Austin writes: A pellucid discussion of happiness and happiness research is Fred Feldman, What is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010). And here’s Feldman’s summary of his book.
4 0.75790399 486 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-26-Age and happiness: The pattern isn’t as clear as you might think
Introduction: A couple people pointed me to this recent news article which discusses “why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.” Here’s the story: When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure–vitality, mental sharpness and looks–they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility–the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness i
5 0.70093721 98 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Further thoughts on happiness and life satisfaction research
Introduction: As part of my continuing research project with Grazia and Roberto, I’ve been reading papers on happiness and life satisfaction research. I’ll share with you my thoughts on some of the published work in this area. Alberto Alesina,, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch published a paper in 2004 called “Inequality and happiness: are Europeans and Americans different?”: We study the effect of the level of inequality in society on individual well-being using a total of 123,668 answers to a survey question about “happiness.” We find that individuals have a lower tendency to report themselves happy when inequality is high, even after controlling for individual income, a large set of personal characteristics, and year and country (or, in the case of the US, state) dummies. The effect, however, is more precisely defined statistically in Europe than in the US. In addition, we find striking differences across groups. In Europe, the poor and those on the left of the political spectru
6 0.68399477 1128 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-19-Sharon Begley: Worse than Stephen Jay Gould?
7 0.67324829 1114 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-12-Controversy about average personality differences between men and women
8 0.6601007 303 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-28-“Genomics” vs. genetics
9 0.65492857 161 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-24-Differences in color perception by sex, also the Bechdel test for women in movies
10 0.6468277 1427 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-24-More from the sister blog
12 0.62532008 1548 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-Health disparities are associated with low life expectancy
13 0.61793417 1386 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-21-Belief in hell is associated with lower crime rates
14 0.61693227 845 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-08-How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes
15 0.59473062 2203 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-08-“Guys who do more housework get less sex”
17 0.58360535 561 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Poverty, educational performance – and can be done about it
19 0.57886934 1172 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-17-Rare name analysis and wealth convergence
20 0.57768202 2236 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-07-Selection bias in the reporting of shaky research
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.036), (5, 0.013), (16, 0.069), (21, 0.014), (24, 0.153), (37, 0.054), (42, 0.012), (43, 0.014), (47, 0.015), (52, 0.019), (82, 0.016), (84, 0.016), (86, 0.045), (95, 0.032), (96, 0.018), (99, 0.306)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9848491 1305 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-07-Happy news on happiness; what can we believe?
Introduction: Sharon Jayson writes : The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings in several studies weren’t so clear-cut and may, in fact, be flawed. The newer analyses presented this week use analytical methods based on data from almost 130,000 adults around the globe — including more than 52,000 parents — and the conclusions aren’t so grim. They say that parents today may indeed be happier than non-parents and that parental happiness levels — while they do drop — don’t dip below the levels they were before having children. . . . The other study, of some 120,000 adults from two nationally representative surveys between 1972-2008, finds that parents were indeed less happy than non-parents in the d
2 0.9779309 5 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-27-Ethical and data-integrity problems in a study of mortality in Iraq
Introduction: Michael Spagat notifies me that his article criticizing the 2006 study of Burnham, Lafta, Doocy and Roberts has just been published . The Burnham et al. paper (also called, to my irritation (see the last item here ), “the Lancet survey”) used a cluster sample to estimate the number of deaths in Iraq in the three years following the 2003 invasion. In his newly-published paper, Spagat writes: [The Spagat article] presents some evidence suggesting ethical violations to the survey’s respondents including endangerment, privacy breaches and violations in obtaining informed consent. Breaches of minimal disclosure standards examined include non-disclosure of the survey’s questionnaire, data-entry form, data matching anonymised interviewer identifications with households and sample design. The paper also presents some evidence relating to data fabrication and falsification, which falls into nine broad categories. This evidence suggests that this survey cannot be considered a reliable or
3 0.9731648 770 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-15-Still more Mr. P in public health
Introduction: When it rains it pours . . . John Transue writes: I saw a post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog today about life expectancy in different US counties. With a bunch of the worst counties being in Mississippi, I thought that it might be another case of analysts getting extreme values from small counties. However, the paper (see here ) includes a pretty interesting methods section. This is from page 5, “Specifically, we used a mixed-effects Poisson regression with time, geospatial, and covariate components. Poisson regression fits count outcome variables, e.g., death counts, and is preferable to a logistic model because the latter is biased when an outcome is rare (occurring in less than 1% of observations).” They have downloadable data. I believe that the data are predicted values from the model. A web appendix also gives 90% CIs for their estimates. Do you think they solved the small county problem and that the worst counties really are where their spreadsheet suggests? My re
4 0.97240984 1231 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-27-Attention pollution
Introduction: I just got called by a robo-poll. I really think there should be a law that anyone who wants to call like this should be a real person and supply their home phone number. This sort of one-way contact is nothing more than harassment. As well as poisoning the well by reducing the inclination of people to participate in legitimate surveys.
Introduction: Maggie Fox writes : Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret “real time” brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week. The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. . . . About half the volunteers had correctly predicted whether they would use sunscreen. The research team analyzed and re-analyzed the MRI scans to see if they could find any brain activity that would do better. Activity in one area of the brain, a particular part of the medial prefrontal cortex, provided the best information. “From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman said. “It is the one re
6 0.9694882 1645 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-31-Statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science
7 0.96892107 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
8 0.96823037 1218 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-18-Check your missing-data imputations using cross-validation
9 0.96815008 2183 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-23-Discussion on preregistration of research studies
10 0.96785349 1162 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-11-Adding an error model to a deterministic model
11 0.96780443 1430 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-26-Some thoughts on survey weighting
14 0.96718675 18 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-06-$63,000 worth of abusive research . . . or just a really stupid waste of time?
15 0.9671371 594 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-28-Behavioral economics doesn’t seem to have much to say about marriage
16 0.96708703 2140 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-19-Revised evidence for statistical standards
17 0.96657324 1910 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-22-Struggles over the criticism of the “cannabis users and IQ change” paper
18 0.96654284 1981 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-14-The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making
19 0.96640086 781 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-28-The holes in my philosophy of Bayesian data analysis
20 0.96622145 1760 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-12-Misunderstanding the p-value