The Problem with Studies
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A recent study purports to measure if women are less happy then they were 35 years ago.
From the abstract:
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.
I’m tempted to send Betsey Stevenson a Facebook message saying, “What is wrong with you? Clearly women have more opportunities than they did 35 years ago, and the very phrasing of this study implies skepticism about whether or not this is a good thing. (And universal rights are, by the way. Unequivocally).”
In “Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?” Barbara Ehrenreich makes several important points. Among them, happiness is difficult to define and changes based on the particular moment the respondents are asked about it, the raw data in this study showed no discernible trend and therefore had to be statistically manipulated to be significant, and declining happiness is not consistent across race (apparently, black women are more happy than they were 35 years ago).
Remember the 1985 Harvard-Yale study that prompted Newsweek to declare that single women over 40 had a better chance of being blown up by a terrorist than getting married? You’d think that, in light of the field’s academic and cultural scandals, today’s research psychologists would give a lot more thought to why they’re measuring what they’re measuring.
I’d really like to live in a world where scientific funding goes to cancer research instead of overtly sexist psychological investigations of questionable validity.
