Relationship Study Issues Example 2

In the last article, we introduced a study that claimed men and women think about sex at roughly equal rates, with numeric values of 19 times a day for men and 18 times a day for women. They collected this data using a clicker that they would click every time some thought about sex popped into their heads. There is a methodological issue here that, thankfully, the researchers did acknowledge.

By telling students they need to click on a button every time they think about sex, they're introducing a variable that changes how often they think about sex. Every time they think about the clicker, or think about whether or not they're thinking about sex and whether they should press the button, etc., they are altering the way they're thinking and the values they provide are not going to be accurate.

The authors of this paper at Ohio State University – a major research institution – do admit that this data collection method can create issues with the data. But then they go on to report their results anyway, and, as is the case with all interesting relationship stories, this paper got picked up and talked about on major news channels around the world. The problem is that this is more than a minor issue. The authors believe that while the numbers may not be accurate, the conclusions they draw likely are – that men and women probably had their thought patterns affected equally by the extraneous variable (the clicker), so that while 19 and 18 may not be the exact numbers, concluding that the numbers are roughly equal with men slightly ahead is a fair.

That's likely not the case. In fact, psychological research found that telling something to think about something or not to think about something, you can completely change how often they think about that information. Indeed, one study even found that if you tell someone NOT to think about bears, for example, that person would think about bears more often than the person told to think about bears.

It stands to reason, then, that the same exact thing happens with sex. If any woman or man tries not to think about sex, or tries to remember how often they're thinking about sex, they are going to think about it more often – at a rate that either far exceeds or drastically differs from the normal rate. You cannot simply introduce variables like this into research and then claim to draw any conclusions.

Your research needs to be free of extraneous variables, because introducing anything into your research can alter the results so drastically that they become completely meaningless, no matter how much you would like to believe they have meaning. Even major researchers, and especially the news media, give far too much value to conclusions drawn from either improperly collected data or erroneous conclusions of correlational data. Don't let your business experience a similar problem.