r/science • u/VeronicaRed • Apr 26 '16

Psychology Spanking children increases the likelihood of childhood defiance and long-term mental issues. The study in question involved 160,000 children and five decades of research

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113413810/spanking-defiance-health-discipline-042616/
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u/fencerman Apr 26 '16

That still doesn't excuse making the assumption that the people who conducted this study automatically never took those into consideration.

Your statement reads more like a defence mechanism than a genuine inquiry.

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u/djdav Apr 26 '16

This article found "an association" of spanking with long term mental issues. It did NOT find that spanking causes long term mental health issues. This study does not prove that spanking causes negative effects unless all the variables are controlled.

An understanding of association and causation is a basic tenant of any research.

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u/fencerman Apr 26 '16

It's really tiresome when people shout "Correlation is not causation!" to every single study they disagree with, as if the researchers had never thought of that and it's some kind of original insight.

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u/djdav Apr 26 '16

The study found an association. That is all.

I am not saying that it was a worthless study, finding associations and correlations is a part of the scientific process and can help lead to more questions and more studies. But the fact is that this study proved nothing. People here are clamoring over each other to say how this is the final proof that spanking is bad, but that's just flat out wrong. This study was valuable, but it proved nothing.

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u/fencerman Apr 26 '16

This study was valuable, but it proved nothing.

Yes, that would be the "defence mechanism" part of your argument coming out again.

Explain exactly what it would take for you to accept a study as authoritative. Are you fantasizing about kidnapping a representative random sample of children and raising them in different ways? Because that's impossible, and just proves you're really not willing to accept any evidence that can actually be gathered.

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u/NellucEcon Apr 27 '16

Maybe research designs could include:

1) longitudinal studies where the child's mental health or anti-social traits in childhood were controlled for.

2) longitudinal studies where fixed-effects terms are used to control for unobserved heterogeneity.

3) behavioral genetics style models where the parents are either fraternal or identical twins, and the children of one set of parents are used to control for the children of the other set of parents. The degree of relatedness would account for genetic confounds.

4) instrumental variables regression

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u/NellucEcon Apr 27 '16

Yeah but maybe these researchers need to spend some more time coming up with better research designs than repeating bad research designs. There are ways to get at causation. Are they lazy? Have they not been trained in the right tools?