Stephen, Thanks for the TIP! I did, see below. I'm sure I probably should've waited until I cooled down, but if I did that, I'm equally sure I would never have gotten around to doing it. So for better or worse, I'm including my piece for your consideration. My guess is they won't accept it, but at least I did what I always implore my students to do when they spot questionable science.
Wally On 4/6/04 10:31 AM, "Stephen Black" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hey Wally: > > Better than that, why not stick it to them directly on their website? > They have the refreshingly open policy of allowing anyone to submit > an electronic response to their published papers. In fact, there's > one there already calling them on this issue (Gallagher: Causal or > casual?). > (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/113/4/708 > and click on "published P3R for this article"). > > If I have a chance, I may do it too. The more complaints, the more > likely they'll pay attention (as if!). > > Stephen Dear Wallace E. Dixon, Jr., Thank you for your submission. Below is a copy of your P3R as we received it. Your P3R, if accepted, should be viewable within a few days. <!-- article ID: 113/4/708 --> <P> I am amazed about what passes for scientific claims these days. Not only did the American Academy of Pediatrics some years ago get away with calling for the removal of all television viewing for all children under age 2 with absolutely no evidence other than its own opinion, now it seems to be advocating for making causal attributions from correlational data. <P> I am not challenging the validity of the revealed correlation between childhood attention-related disorders and television viewing in infancy and toddlerhood. I am trusting the authors conducted their analyses accurately. The problem is that the authors ran wild in making causal implications about the direction of effects with absolutely no scientific license to do so. If psychologists did this, I would like to think their peer reviewers would call them on it, and require them to reframe their conclusions in more cautionary language long before publication would ever be permitted. Apparently the same admonitions do not take place among all medical researchers, nor among some of their peer-reviewed journals. <P> Here's the deal. At least two alternative explanations can be made to account for the relationship between TV-viewing and attention- related disorders in childhood. First, it is possible, indeed I would say even likely, that children with attention-span problems are more likely to find television interesting than children without attention-related problems. Children's television programs are made exceptionally attention-grabbing by virtue of their fast-paced, exciting, frequent-scene-changing, musical styles of presentation they employ. Although this is appealing to all children, it's not surprising that it's especially appealing to attention-disordered children who seem to find the normal world especially boring. TV may provide the most stimulating bang for the buck of any environmental stimulus out there. Unlike attention-disordered children, children without such disorders can find solace in lots of stimuli besides TV; but for attention-disordered infants and toddlers, this may be the best they can hope for. <P> The authors dismiss this possiblity because according to them, most experts believe that attention-related disorders don't emerge until later childhood. Unfortunately, the beliefs of experts have nothing to do with reality, unless those beliefs are based on data. To be sure, attention-related disorders are likely to be "discovered" in childhood, as opposed to infancy, because it is during childhood that children with attention-related disorders run smack-dab into the highly structured school setting, which tends not to give children with attention-related disorders much latitude. But the fact that these disorders aren't reported frequently until school age, has nothing to do with whether or not they are present before school age. These disorders may be present from birth, we just don't know! If a child has an attention-related disorder at birth, it strikes me that she or he would likely to keep the disorder until well into adulthood. <P> This leads to a second alternative interpretation of the data reported in this article. That is that parents of infants who have attention-related disorders may turn to TV as a last resort for dealing with their potentially difficult children. The literature on infant and toddler temperament is replete with data linking temperamental difficulty to parenting practices. Children with difficult temperaments tend to have weary, tired, hapless, and frustrated parents. Is this a coincidence? Probably not. It makes sense that children with difficult temperaments would produce parents who develop parenting tactics to deal with their children's difficult temperaments, and TV-viewing might be one of the most successful parenting tactics employed. In this case, TV-viewing wouldn't be responsible for attention-related disorders. Quite the contrary, attention-related disorders would be responsible for parenting tactics that result in TV-viewing. But alas, this possibility is given short-shrift by the authors in this article. The fact is that infants and todders with difficult temperaments also tend to have short attention-spans, so parents who can find a means to successfully maintain the attention of their temperamentally difficult infants and toddlers may have also found a means to attenuate their infants' and toddlers' temperamental difficulty. <P> (Ironically, if I were trying to publish this kind of research in Pediatrics, I might so far as to claim that the difficult temperament caused the parents to become weary, tired, hapless, and frustrated. But as a psychologist, I hold strongly to the old adage "correlation does not imply causation." So I am left with the mere suggestion that it might be so.) <P> The bottom line is that the recieved and, it seems to me, extremely destructive result of this article may be that the general public will declare that when children have ADHD, it is the fault of their parents who let them watch too much TV. If ADHD gets blamed on parents, who knows what's next; maybe health insurance rates for treating ADHD will be determined partially as a function of how many TVs are in the home. Meanwhile, research funding for the real cause of ADHD may become reduced by communities who fail to understand the difference between correlation and causation, and attempts to find a cure for ADHD may become further removed from the gaping arms of waiting, suffering children. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wallace E. Dixon, Jr. | Chair and Associate Professor | Rocket science is child's play of Psychology | compared to understanding Department of Psychology | child's play East Tennessee State University | -unknown Johnson City, TN 36714 | (423) 439-6656 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
