An Academic Question

"An academic question is one whose answer may be of interest but is of no practical use or importance" - hey this is not my definition, it's the first answer from a google search.

Twenty years ago a "social scientist" professor and his wife picked over 100 children from the UC Berkeley area. 95 of those children have been tracked and a Canadian newspaper is reporting the findings.

Lo and behold, the findings indicate that children who are "whiny" grow up to be conservative and the "confident" kids grow up to be liberal. Who'd of thought it? What a shocking surprise!

No, not that that's how the kids turned out, but that an unscientific survey conducted by a UC Berkeley professor should have discovered such a thing. Who could have predicted that?

See why I hate poorly constructed research with a passion? Gives all market researchers a bad name.

From the article:

"The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings."

Wow! A nursery school teacher who knows how to conduct rigorous personality tests on toddlers they've known for such a long time. I'd love to know why "whiny" was an acceptable assessment - to the nursery school teacher and to the hot shot professor. I'll have to read Hans Eysenck again, missed the "whiny" categorisation first skim through.

There's the missed opportunity, tracking those nursery school teachers to see how accurately they judged personalities then and what they're up to these days.

I love the idea that "there's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings" - what, none at all? If the investigators were not "looking" for political orientation (of toddlers, remember) why are they doing so now? And what were the parents' political orientations? And what was the birth order of the children? And what was their social class? And on and on, just raises so many question doesn't it.

These kids are now 23? 24? Who said "when you're young, if you aren't a liberal you have no heart and when you're old if you aren't conservative you have no brain" - was it Winston? It's the kind of thing he would have said.

Summing up - 95 kids from one neighbourhood, whose personalities were judged by people who were nursery school teachers OR assistants (.....no I'm not going to type a mean comment here) were judged to be "whiny" or "confident" and more of the confident ones turned out to be liberal.

Bottom line? Purely academic ie. of interest but of no practical use or importance.