[FairfieldLife] Re: From a MUM web page / Matched Control Cities
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bill (William)Simmons [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cut and pasted this claim from a MUM web page claiming that Where as little as 1% of population is practising TM the trend of rising crime rates is REVERSED. Cities in which one per cent of the population were instructed in the Transcendental Meditation Programme showed decreased crime rate the following year, in contrast to matched control cities. Reference: Journal of Crime and Justice 4: 2545, 1981. Cities in which one per cent of the population were instructed in the Transcendental Meditation Programme showed a trend of decreased crime rate in subsequent years, in contrast to matched control cities. Reference: Journal of Crime and Justice 4: 2545, 1981. 318. DILLBECK, M.C.; LANDRITH III, G.; and ORME-JOHNSON, D.W. The Transcendental Meditation Program and crime rate change in a sample of forty-eight cities. Findings previously published in Journal of Crime and Justice 4: 25-45, 1981. Matched control cities a methodology often cited in ME studies, including above, and DOJ's analysis of FF crime, have always seemed to be a methodologically difficult issue. Matched pairs is an often used resarch method for creating a control group from observed data (that is there was not a pre-selection of a control group prior to the intervention / dose. Though it is error-prone, such errors and biaseas can be reduced using rigourous statistical methods to match multiple criteria that have been shown to effect the response -- the dependent variable. For example, in doing a google search on matched pair cities I found no other studies that used matched pairs for comparision of cities. Understandably so given the huge difficulty in rigorously match for the things I cited in my my earlier post -- flaws in DOJ's FF crime anaylsis: demographic cohorts, temperature, seasonal effects, education levels, % with active religious affiliations, income levels and regional economic trends would be useful if not necessary control / matching factors for a credible analysis. One study that had matched pairs and cities showed up, but was about matching individuals within a city. Their rigor is of notable contrast to DOJ's and the above study. Case patients and controls were similar in terms of age, gender, insurance status, median household income, and proportion with an underlying premorbid neurodevelopmental disease (Table 1 [triangle]). Case patients were more likely to be Asian or of Hispanic ethnicity. The odds of Asian children having been involved as a pedestrian in an accident were 5.8 times as high as those for White children (P = .018), and the odds of Latino children having been involved were 4.3 times as high (P = .038). http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1448312 And they end the paragraph stateing Admitting diagnoses of controls are available on request from the authors. Hardly an offer made by ME researchers that i have ever seen. This is critical in that the method by which, and the factors used to construct the pairs is critical. Many sets of unmatched pairs across ten or more critical variables -- but matching in one, could be constructed. None would be methodologicaly valid. Many small cities, literally 100,000s could be matched for per capital violent crime rates if that, and rough population size small town were used. What criteria was used for developing the presumably much smaller set of matched pairs cities. The huge onus is on the resarchers to demonstrate that some random process was used, and not cherry-picking to secure the results desired/expected by sponsors. The fact that DOJ did not even included a parallel analysis of matched parirs for property crime is highly suspect. Did it not show a useful reduction of crime? Another study that came up was forweather -- again not matching cities. http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch7en/appl7en/ch7a1en.html Although road safety researchers focus primarily on driver behavior, vehicular defects and road design, there is general agreement that environmental factors, such as weather and darkness, also affect accident risk. Research on weather-related hazards, especially precipitation, has made extensive use of matched sampling. This application of matched sampling first requires weather data that can be used to identify precipitation events. Each event is then matched with a suitable control period (i.e. a period of 'nice' weather). For example, a Monday afternoon rain shower lasting from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. would be paired with the same three hour period on a Monday afternoon just one or two weeks prior to or following the event. The absence of any kind of adverse weather during the control period is an essential feature of this method. Events without a suitable control are deleted from the sample. It states, the main reason for choosing this quasi-experimental design is related to the degree of
[FairfieldLife] Re: From a MUM web page / Matched Control Cities
Re: From a MUM web page / Matched Control Cities --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bill (William)Simmons [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cut and pasted this claim from a MUM web page claiming that Where as little as 1% of population is practising TM the trend of rising crime rates is REVERSED. Cities in which one per cent of the population were instructed in the Transcendental Meditation Programme showed decreased crime rate the following year, in contrast to matched control cities. Reference: Journal of Crime and Justice 4: 2545, 1981. Cities in which one per cent of the population were instructed in the Transcendental Meditation Programme showed a trend of decreased crime rate in subsequent years, in contrast to matched control cities. Reference: Journal of Crime and Justice 4: 2545, 1981. 318. DILLBECK, M.C.; LANDRITH III, G.; and ORME-JOHNSON, D.W. The Transcendental Meditation Program and crime rate change in a sample of forty-eight cities. Findings previously published in Journal of Crime and Justice 4: 25-45, 1981. Matched control cities a methodology often cited in ME studies, including above, and DOJ's analysis of FF crime, have always seemed to be a methodologically difficult issue. Matched pairs is an often used resarch method for creating a control group from observed data (that is there was not a pre-selection of a control group prior to the intervention / dose. Though it is error-prone, such errors and biaseas can be reduced using rigourous statistical methods to match multiple criteria that have been shown to effect the response -- the dependent variable. For example, in doing a google search on matched pair cities I found no other studies that used matched pairs for comparision of cities. Understandably so given the huge difficulty in rigorously match for the things I cited in my my earlier post -- flaws in DOJ's FF crime anaylsis: demographic cohorts, temperature, seasonal effects, education levels, % with active religious affiliations, income levels and regional economic trends would be useful if not necessary control / matching factors for a credible analysis. One study that had matched pairs and cities showed up, but was about matching individuals within a city. Their rigor is of notable contrast to DOJ's and the above study. Case patients and controls were similar in terms of age, gender, insurance status, median household income, and proportion with an underlying premorbid neurodevelopmental disease (Table 1 [triangle]). Case patients were more likely to be Asian or of Hispanic ethnicity. The odds of Asian children having been involved as a pedestrian in an accident were 5.8 times as high as those for White children (P = .018), and the odds of Latino children having been involved were 4.3 times as high (P = .038). http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1448312 And they end the paragraph stateing Admitting diagnoses of controls are available on request from the authors. Hardly an offer made by ME researchers that i have ever seen. This is critical in that the method by which, and the factors used to construct the pairs is critical. Many sets of unmatched pairs across ten or more critical variables -- but matching in one, could be constructed. None would be methodologicaly valid. Many small cities, literally 100,000s could be matched for per capital violent crime rates if that, and rough population size small town were used. What criteria was used for developing the presumably much smaller set of matched pairs cities. The huge onus is on the resarchers to demonstrate that some random process was used, and not cherry-picking to secure the results desired/expected by sponsors. The fact that DOJ did not even included a parallel analysis of matched parirs for property crime is highly suspect. Did it not show a useful reduction of crime? Another study that came up was forweather -- again not matching cities. http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch7en/appl7en/ch7a1en.html Although road safety researchers focus primarily on driver behavior, vehicular defects and road design, there is general agreement that environmental factors, such as weather and darkness, also affect accident risk. Research on weather-related hazards, especially precipitation, has made extensive use of matched sampling. This application of matched sampling first requires weather data that can be used to identify precipitation events. Each event is then matched with a suitable control period (i.e. a period of 'nice' weather). For example, a Monday afternoon rain shower lasting from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. would be paired with the same three hour period on a Monday afternoon just one or two weeks prior to or following the event. The absence of any kind of adverse weather during the control period is an essential feature of this method. Events without a suitable control are deleted from the sample. It states, the main reason for choosing this quasi-experimental design
