The Social Sources of Fandom

Thoughts on Michael Jackson — what a strange guy, gee his Dad seemed to really mess him up, very talented, and did he or didn’t he do a 50 degree lean in the Smooth Criminal video? Also, though people often talk about him as transcending race, I tend to see one racial group represented outside UCLA and Encino on the news (and it’s not the group that I would have expected).

I am more curious about fandom. Is there anyone who, if they died, you would go wander around outside of the hospital or their house or the Apollo?* Without diminishing Michael Jackson, I can think of few people (outside my friends and family) who would compel me to organized vigils.**

Responses like this must have more to do with the fans than with the person that died, yet the person must have achieved some base level of notoriety to garner this level of attention. Is it an interaction between characteristics of fans and the characteristics of performers? Do things like this happen at certain cultural/political/economic moments? How do you reconcile the outpouring with rapidly declining popularity, as in the case of MJ? I’m developing hypotheses but don’t quite know where to begin…

*A friend from high school once dragged me to a Jerry Garcia tribute in Loring Park
after he died. Apparently, I wasn't appropriately reverent (I kept making cracks
about the strong smell of patchouli oil), she's still mad about it. I thought
the whole experience was weird -- and I'm not sure my previous lack of interest
in the Grateful Dead had anything to do with it.
**One comes to mind but I fear saying it out loud, lest I cosmically make it happen.

More Equations=Less Substantive Meaning?

I attended an excellent mini-conference/workshop last year. It got me thinking about my #1 rule for presentations, however == the talk is an advertisement for the paper, not the paper itself.

Though the conference emphasized quantitative methods and all talks devoted significant time to discussions of method, selection bias, causality, and the like, not all of the talks included equations or significant verbage about subscripts.*  With few exceptions, the more equations, the less emphasis on substantive meaning and the more audience confusion and/or disinterest. A buddy and I watched a bunch of talks over the course of a few days — I couldn’t help but notice that lots of equations tended to go along with whispered comments like this:

What’s the outcome again?

Why is he/she making such a big deal about such a substantively small difference?

Or, most telling and sophisticated (written on a piece of paper):

WTF?

Perhaps my friend and I are not savvy with methods or statistics (though the evidence weighs against this — we were both invited to speak at the workshop after all) but I find the fetish with subscript is very much getting in the way of meaningful discussions about the social world. Moreover, the comments directed at non-subscript talks were just as rigorous with respect to method — talks that were more substantively-engaged just garnered more of them because they maintained the audience interest.

So, if you’re preparing your ASA talk, drop the equations. You can’t do it in 15 minutes. Give your audience a break and leave it to the reviewers or your friends and colleagues to catch that your propensity score model sucks** or that you’re using OLS to predict a binary outcome.

*The conference required submission of a paper and provided discussants
for each panel. My impression was that most attendees also read the papers
in advance so it's highly likely a major mis-specification or error would have
been caught, even in the absence of a lengthy equation discussion in the talk.

**Don't even get me started on the obsession with propensity score models
plaguing sociology -- it's as if omitted variable bias is no longer a problem
and we're all magically turning observational data into experiments with a wave
of a logit model wand. I've reviewed a bunch of papers lately with no information
on how well the propensity score model actually predicts the treatment, apart
from the obligatory 'see, it's balanced!' discussion -- it's approaching pet peeve
status for me. Am I wrong on this?

More signs of hypocrisy…

While most of you are posting on Iran,* I choose to post on what Liv Tyler is up to…

Liv Tyler recently intervened in a parking lot when she observed a woman hollering at a crying child in a stroller — by all accounts, the woman didn’t appreciate the assistance from a concerned citizen and promptly told Ms. Tyler where to go.

One of my students interviewed me for a research project he was doing on discipline, mainly when other parents intervene with children not their own. I spewed a bunch of sociological nonsense about how it takes a village to raise a child and how it is important to me that Junior obey/respect others. I then filled in with a couple of heart-warming stories about my good friends and how happy I am that Junior does not distinguish between them and me when it comes to discipline.

A few days later, Junior’s nanny informed me that a father at the park had hollered at Junior because she shoved aside his (younger) child to get on the slide. The nanny (aka Junior’s better mommy) blew a bit of a gasket and lectured the dad about how best to handle the situation, emphasizing her role as caretaker and the importance of letting her handle it. She relayed this to me mostly so that I would know not to let Junior play with that kid again (kids can do no wrong, but beware the nanny network that identifies you as a bad or lax parent). Junior has since relayed the story of the “man who yelled at me” to any and all for the last week. She appears to have forgotten about the small matter of shoving the smaller child…

Here’s what I suspect my undergraduate won’t be able to tease out… How much of the problem in the Tyler situation has to do with a young privileged white woman intervening with someone described as an older ‘abuelita’? How likely is it that Dad would have yelled had I been there (instead of my young, *Spanish* nanny)? How bothered would Junior’s nanny have been had the Daddy been a Mommy? More importantly, is all of this a message to Junior that she’s free to be a brat outside the presence of her mother, nanny, and her mother’s best friends? I suspect so…

Despite my interview to the contrary, I’m pretty sure Dad yelling at my little princess would have pissed me off too. I also would have told Liv Tyler to take a flying leap.

*Though, via Twitter, I'm planning a move to Tehran.
And, ahh, the women and revolution. Fantastic.

I laughed out loud…

I post this for no other reason than that it is hilarious…

From an article on how Oprah Winfrey may be, you know, killing us with her shows on health:

This perpetual search for The Answer reached its apex a couple of years ago, when Oprah led the frenzy over The Secret. The video and accompanying book were a rehash of one of the oldest of self-help truisms—”think positive”—refreshed with a dusting of “science.” The secret of The Secret was something called the Law of Attraction….

On one of the Secret shows, Oprah gave an example of the scientific power of the concept. She said that once, while she was hosting an episode about a man who could blow really big soap bubbles, she was thinking to herself, “Gee, that looks fun. I would like to blow some bubbles.” When she returned to her office after the show, there, on her desk, was a silver Tiffany bubble blower. “So I call my assistant,” Oprah told the audience. “I say, ‘Did you just run out and get me some bubbles? ‘Cause I got bubbles by my desk.’ And she says, ‘No, the bubbles were always there. I bought you bubbles for your birthday and you didn’t notice them until today’.”

There are many lessons that might be drawn from this anecdote. One is that if you give Oprah a thoughtful gift, she may not bother to notice it or thank you for it. This is not the lesson Oprah took away from her story. Because the way she sees it, her assistant hadn’t really given her the gift at all. She gave it to herself. Using the power of The Secret, she said, “I had called in some bubbles.”

where an instructor admits lack of knowledge (and then rationalizes it)

I was reading an article on celibacy and the priesthood the other day and came across this:

And while abstinence does not inevitably lead to child molestation, critics are quick to draw a link between priestly celibacy and recent pedophilia scandals.

My first thought… “Wait a minute, does celibacy often lead to child molestation?” This is no mere post about correlation not equaling causation — the scandals in the Catholic church aside, is there a correlation between celibacy and child molestation? What is its strength? Are Catholic priests totally responsible for it? Finally, while we’re at it, I’d be interested in the methods of that study…

The line hit home because I recently gave my end of the quarter lecture on sex offenders — every time I give it, I am bothered by how little sociological criminology there is on this topic. I believe that our way of viewing the world is highly relevant to the study of sex offenders (especially re: punishment) but harbor suspicions that more attention to them from sociological criminologists would highlight a lot of nagging problems with our theories.

My students rarely catch this but there are some [many? a few important?] ways in which sex offenders don’t quite fit the theories that I tend to apply to everything else I think about.* Yeah, they seem to have really low recidivism rates but [some] of them do appear to specialize, start earlier, and take longer to age out. I’ve often wondered whether patterns of sex offender recidivism have changed in the tough on crime era. I’ve often thought of studying sex offenders more explicitly but, no pun intended, it’s a slightly stigmatizing area of research. More problematic, every time I delve more deeply into the research literature, I give up (with a serious case of the heebie-jeebies) because I inevitably end up reading stuff that might as well be a script for A Clockwork Orange, the Sequel.

On a related note, I’m considering hiring a grad student to pose as a sex offender and tell a made-up “ex-sex offender” narrative to one of my classes. My thought is that I would have the person tell a story similar to those offered by ex-thieves or ex-gang members (who routinely come to undergrad crim classes). If you’re not familiar, the story is usually “I met a good woman and then we had a baby,” or “I aged out and got tired of the streets,” or “An employer/teacher/priest took a chance on me,” or some combination of the above three. I’m thinking a panel, where the ex-violent/but not sex offender and the ex-sex offender tell virtually identical stories. I am certain the students will reject a story they readily accept in many other contexts, when applied to a sex offender, but I am unsure if they will do it publicly, during class. Thoughts?

*When they do catch it, I tend to riff on definitional problems (e.g., who do we count as
a sex offender, what group are we interested in?). I have a point but it's also my way
of getting away from the question as I think it's an important one that I don't quite
know the answer to...

I knew it was all her fault! (Hillary redux)

I am irritated with all the backlash against Elizabeth Edwards. Would I have written a book if I were her? Probably not. Would I describe her as “complicit in a cover-up” for not running out to tell the public days after she found out that her husband was having an affair? Definitely not. A sampling:

They had what seemed to be this ideal marriage. And it turns out that she was complicit in basically this cover- up. She knew all along that he’d had an affair, that he cheated on her, and decided that they would go along with this massive cover-up, and she ultimately decided that his political career was worth more than being honest.

There’s clearly something in her personality that is pushing her to get the last word. I think she is at risk of diminishing her own stature. I mean, people held her up as the soul of this relationship, and now she’s turned it into a spectacle again.

She ended up going along, helping sell the voters on her husband’s character as a truth teller and charm as a loving husband and father.

I’m a person who has always liked Hillary (and Bill, come to that) much more than Elizabeth (and John). I find John a bit too charming, a little too smooth. I’m not sure why she felt compelled to write a book (though I also have a ‘you go, girl’ sort of reaction to it). Still, it’s one thing for the public to weigh in once an affair becomes known but to suggest that Elizabeth Edwards had a duty to call a press conference is beyond the pale.

It’s not clear to me that affairs have much of anything to do with whether or not one will be a good president. (Or even something much more unseemly — Hey, New Yorkers, how’s Paterson working out?).* If that were the standard, marital fidelity statistics suggest we’ll have a tough time finding good candidates. Finally, while it’s been nice to read about the Obamas’ date nights and overall martial bliss, if they have a big argument or Michelle flirts with a  waiter or Barack spends too much time with an attractive female aide, I really don’t need to hear about it. And, in the unlikely event of any of the above, I’d like to think we wouldn’t turn on Michelle faster than one can say too-toned arms.

*This is not to say that the power differential/illegality in the Clinton/Spitzer
cases did not bother me.

Arlen Spector

Reading the news that Arlen Spector has joined the Democratic Party, I felt a moment of jubilee and then, upon reflection, a bit of concern.

I sort of like checks and balances. Once/If Franken ever gets to Washington, the Dems are filibuster-proof.

More worrisome, can you guess when the last time the Democratic party held a filibuster-proof majority?

I’m shovel-ready… but I have no stamps or toner.

I am experiencing significant cognitively-dissonant whiplash when faced with the massive amounts of potential grant money targeted specifically at all the stuff I am working on (NIH, Robert Wood Johnson, BJS, NSF, Oh My!) in the context of a hiring freeze, bad or no food at talks (which doesn’t really matter because we can’t fly anyone out anyway), little hope of upgrading my computer in the near future, and an inability to hand out paper copies of my syllabi to my students as a result of massive budget cuts.

My biggest problems today: No money for stamps but frenetic work completing a crazy number of grant applications that are due in April, May, June, and August.

It’s a weird new world in the ivory tower…

In which NSP also has a bit of a breakdown.

I knew I’d be in trouble if I watched Jenny McCarthy and company on Larry King Live talking about autism but I did…

If you mean to say this [per your lawyer's instructions, I'm sure]:

CARREY: We are not saying don’t vaccinate. That’s the thing we want to get really clear right now with …

and this,

CARREY: Vaccinate for the measles…

Then it’s probably not a good idea to have your co-author (a pediatrician who describes himself as an ‘outcast’ in the pediatric community) say this, a few minutes later:

KARTZINEL: I was just doing general pediatrics and after my son regressed after the mumps, measles and rubella and my wife said, you broke them now you fix them, that’s when I started saying, OK, what can I do?

KING: Do you know why it causes it?

KARTZINEL: I think again, the mumps-measles and rubella, for my son, it’s different for other children, was the tipping point.

This statement also doesn’t go too far in making your concerns for public health clear nor does it clearly distinguish between not vaccinating at all and your argument that parents should reduce or delay some shots:

KING: Isn’t the problem here, Jenny, that people sometimes listen with one ear are going to panic. And not vaccine at all?

MCCARTHY: Probably. But guess what? It’s not my fault. The reason why they’re not vaccinating is because the vaccines are not safe. Make a better product and then parents will vaccinate.

Finally, note to researchers at UC-Davis and the MIND Institute, this guy is totally misrepresenting your recent research in as many public forums as possible.

What next… the c-word in headlines?

I was shocked to see the word ’skank’ used on cnn.com a few weeks ago. When did this word make it into general usage? I’ve used it fewer times than I can count on one hand and it is typically my most toxic insult — I generally try to avoid gendered insults. I thought of providing a link to the urban dictionary definition but found it too inappropriate. It’s not so much that I am delicate about language — Junior’s vocabulary is a continuing concern. But I tend to stick to the classics, eschewing anything beyond an f-bomb, the d-word, or the s-word.

More problematic, Junior is currently Dora-obsessed. I’m not ready for general body image discussions yet, let alone a complicated discussion on whether or not Dora’s affection for Boots and Swiper is feigned solely to procure drugs, money, or popularity.