This study focused on mothers of infants and found that depressed mothers did not do parenting as well as they might. Duh duh.
And these depressed mothers were more at risk for domestic violence and substance abuse. Duh duh duh.
Ok, I understand the desire to somehow quantify all these sociological issues, but then I think about how large swaths of society seem to reject the very concept of the scientific method, and I really wonder what the point is.
Eh, I must be a bit depressed this morning.
Ah, but it’s citeable. By verifying something laymen would consider obvious, these people make it possible for others to use a citeable source in their own work. Do not discount the value of citeability until you claim, in a class assignment, that “sometimes, people using subtitles due to being hard of hearing will complain that there are no subtitles when they can tell that the characters are speaking” and gotten back a “you must provide appropriate sources for all your affirmations” which makes GD’s “cite?” feel like a caress (oh, and this from people who do not consider “personal communication” citeable when Harvard does, and I happen to have heard those complaints in person… as another student put it, “if we claimed that Madrid is the capital of Spain they’d ask for a scholarly article about it”).
Citeability on the apparently-obvious is needed in order to be able to move on to study the not-so-obvious. And sometimes you even get to discover that the obvious is not true!
It’s a Sociology thing. It’s not like “a study on emergent involuntary group cohesion methods in subcultures (Brainwashing for fun and profit)” is of any practical use… unless you happen to be wonder how certain behaviors seem to appear in nearly all small group interactions, from military units to religious cults. It’s mostly about keeping score, and trying to appear like you’re actually doing something besides sleeping through lectures. And they even give you a degree…
Oh, and apparently the reason for doing the study(pdf) was to “identify current service systems that could intervene and help depressed mothers find support.” Which could be of some use… if you happen to control the aforementioned services.
People who believe that being poor is a always due to moral failure on the part of the impoverished will probably continue to do so.
My law journal’s motto was “If you intend to state that the sky is blue, you’d better have a cite.”
I don’t really miss it.
I love your thread title. Trenchant and pithy.
Sure, but why do they need to waste time writing newspaper articles about the studies? Isn’t the point of news to inform? Not much of that is happening when they report on studies that prove the already bloody obvious.
This article is only a waste of time if you believe that after reading it, absolutely no one will be convinced to take a closer look at their erroneous beliefs. That may be the case, but it’s more likely that in a small number of people, this article will plant a seed of doubt. If enough seeds get planted, eventually you wind up with a more enlightened populace.
It couldn’t have been easy to convince entire cultures that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. Does that mean no one should have tried?
What, to counteract the common belief that the poor are cheerful?
Hee hee, no, that the poor live in poverty because they choose to.
So money really does buy happiness?
Frequently studies find things that aren’t obvious. Other times they show things that were obvious but which had never been scientifically verified. Both types of studies are useful.
It was useful to have a study on depression and poverty among mothers of infants. This showed not just that poor people are depressed, but that the amount of depression among poor mothers is huge. Furthermore, it showed that even severe depression among those mothers frequently isn’t getting treated. It was far from obvious that the amount of depression was that large.
When scientists do experiments, sometimes they come up with the expected results and sometimes they come up with unexpected ones and they are happy with either one. Do you seriously think that scientists say to themselves, “Oh, well, the result I came up with won’t satisfy a lot of nonscientists who will just ignore it because they believe that they are always right and science is a waste of time. I guess I might as well just throw away the paper I was going to write because it won’t convince those sorts of people”? Scientists write papers to convince other scientists who have some reasonable ability to change their mind when they are shown results that show something unexpected. They don’t care about what people who always ignore scientific results think.
At the least it puts sadness on a layaway plan.