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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (17501)	4/25/2000 2:29:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 769667

I do find it a little perplexing that you seem very concerned about the possible incorrect assumption one might take regarding statistics as they relate to correlation and causation here, but didn't seem to share any of those concerns the other day when discussing the teenage abortion and pregnancy statistics from the Netherlands. Several reasons. First, the narrower the subject under discussion, the fewer are the external variables which come into play. Second, a pregnancy or abortion rate is far more intrinsically measurable that "happiness" or religious belief. People tend to tell a poll-taker what they think the poll-taker wants to hear. Third, timing of events is critical to assessing the influence of external factors. If a government embarked on a campaign of sex education in 1980, and the teenage pregnancy rate from 1970-1980 was significantly higher than the rate from 1980-1990, it would be much easier to isolate and evaluate external influences, and thus the argument for causation would be much stronger. In the Finnish study in particular, I recall that the chronologies were quite persuasive. Fourth, I don't have time to go back and look now, but I'm fairly sure that I remember considerable discussion of possible external influences in the studies I read. Academic studies generally include such material; the people who write them don't want to be picked to bits by rival academics. Think-tank studies operate under a more liberal regimen, since they are usually only read by people who agree with their conclusions. I can probably think of a few more, those are off th top of my head.