Michael Hobbes shared a Tweet from Nick Gillespie. That Tweet was about an essay from The Bulwark. That Tweet plays fast and loose with Likert-type scale interpretation.
The way Hobbes and his Twitter followers break down the issues with this headline provides a lesson on how to examine suspicious research clickbait that doesn't pass the sniff test. First off, who says "close to one in four"? And why are they evoking the attempt on Salman Rushdie's life, which did not happen on a college campus and is unrelated to high-profile campus protests of controversial speakers?
Hobbes dug into the survey cited in the Bulwark piece. The author of the Bulwark piece interpreted the data by collapsing across response options on a Likert-type response scale. Which can be done responsibly, I think. "Very satisfied" and "satisfied" are both happy customers, right? But this is suspicious.
Other Twitter users questioned the question and how it may leave room for interpretation in the participants' minds.
This led to other ways of thinking about this data and wondering about the underlying approval of violence in society. Maybe students are like the rest of America? Oh, snap, is this an example for priors and chi-square (o v. e) thinking? Just maybe.
Regardless, I think this is a good lesson in how to examine clickbait claims. We teach our students that dichotomizing decreases variability in a data set. In this instance, however, the researchers are being dirty not just because of lost variability but this is trying to paint a picture of college student incivility.
Depending on how you want to unpack this in class, it may be helpful to have:
1) The original story from The Bulwark.
2) The original data from College Pulse.
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