On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:06:39 -0700, Beth Benoit wrote: >Sunday's NYTimes did a nice job explaining Jerome Kagan's >research on temperament. Most of the research articles we read >don't give little tidbits of interesting information, and I find these >are helpful to spiff up my lectures in class. > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html
I admit that it is a good read but one has to be cautious about drawing easy conclusions from the decades of research Kagan and colleagues have performed. The most obvious problem is that of sampling bias. As the article mentions, most if not all of the subjects were white, middle-class, and born healthy. Not mentioned is "what kind of parent allows their 4 month old participate in a research study?" Surely such parents would be different from parents who would refuse to have their children participate (much like volunteer subjects differ from non-volunteers). Self-selection for follow-up participation further biases the sample. In the end, to whom do these results generalize to? Do they tell us anything about the temperament of non-white, non-middle-class, and infants born with health difficulties? Perhaps Kagan's research has far less generalizability then he and his colleagues are will to admit, far less than that implied in the article. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
