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I wrote a brief response on Wednesday to the article “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors” by Ellen Greenberger et al, promising more soon. Then the NYU occupation hit, and I didn’t get back to it as quickly as I’d hoped. But the article, which appeared in the November 2008 issue of The Journal of Youth and Adolescence, is riding a wave of media attention, and there’s a lot more that needs saying about it.
The crucial problem with the article is in its methodology. It’s not at all clear that it measures what it claims to be measuring, and it presents its findings in such a way as to seriously mislead the casual reader as to what the students it surveyed actually said. I’ll dig into those issues in an upcoming post.
For now, though, I’d like to point out one narrow fact: Greenberger’s findings are based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of American college students.
As many academics do, Greenberger and her colleagues found their research subjects by advertising among students on their home campus — they put up flyers asking students to participate in a study, and gave a questionnaire to the students who responded. In this case, the home campus was University of California at Irvine, a highly-competitive university whose entering students have an average high school GPA of 3.95.
For this particular study, the researchers posted flyers in the UC Irvine Social Sciences Human Subjects Laboratory, and posted a notice at the lab’s website.
As they report in their article, these postings brought in 466 student participants. Of those students, 364, or 78.1%, were women, and 269, or 57.7%, were of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. Nearly all were social science majors.
The sample, then, was unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and unrepresentative in ways that the authors acknowledge may have influenced the study’s results — they note, for instance, that students of Asian descent returned higher scores on measures of what they call “Academic Entitlement” than non-Asians, and that students who were not born in the US returned higher scores than those who were.
So this was a study of social science majors at an extremely selective, extremely competitive research university. It was a sample that was demographically unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. And yet its findings have been eagerly reported as evidence of what American students, as a group, believe.
All of this is significant to our interpretation of the study, but it’s just a lead-up to my favorite tidbit about the way the sample was assembled. More on that in my next post.
(If you’d like to be notified about that post when it goes up, feel free to start following our twitter feed.)
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a law-professors’ group blog, someone put up a link yesterday to a post by a guy who calls himself Gay Patriot West, saying that gay conservatives on campus get a warmer welcome from conservatives than they do from gays.
The comments thread on the Volokh post explored the issue from a few different angles, but it didn’t address one that I consider crucial — the historical context. Here’s the meat of my contribution to the discussion, posted just a little while ago:
Whatever ease gays have around conservatives exists only because of limitations on conservatives’ political power.
Fifty years ago, you could be imprisoned or institutionalized for being gay or lesbian. You could be jailed for hanging out with gays. You could lose your business if that business catered to gay people. Forget having any job security, or any recognition for your relationships, or any social deference to your life choices except in the most anomalous subcultures. To be gay or lesbian in the United States fifty years ago was to live in fear of disclosure and persecution.
Most of that has changed. But it has changed despite conservatives, not because of them. To a large degree it has changed over the vocal and forceful opposition of conservatives. It has changed because conservatives’ power has waned, because conservatives’ power has been constrained, and because conservatives have realized that most Americans don’t agree with their most anti-gay positions. And yes, it has changed because many conservatives have become less hostile to gays and lesbians, buoyed along by a broader cultural transformation that they did not initiate.
To the extent that it is easy to be a gay person among conservatives today, that is because of the weakness of traditional conservative values in American society today. The idea of conservatives as second-class citizens, deprived of basic civil rights, is a right-wing fever dream. That of gays and lesbians being deprived of basic civil rights is a matter of historical record.
The Gay Patriot has his ease because his side has been defeated in a thousand hard-fought struggles over the last half-century.
One other thing that I could have mentioned: The social and political climate for lesbians and gays in America has changed least in the last half-century in the parts of the country where conservatives remain strongest. It has changed the most in those places where conservatism is weakest. Gay Patriot West went to the University of Virginia law school. He lives in Los Angeles today. His experience of being a conservative gay man reflects those facts of his geography.
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