Wednesday, October 10, 2007

More evidence that I picked the wrong topic for my PhD

Over at Paper Cuts, the NY Times book blog, Dwight Garner has a post about "A Scientist's Eyewitness Report" on Group Sex.

Now there's a research project I could really embrace. "Honey, I'm not sleeping around - it's ethnography." I wonder how many people you would need to sleep with before the findings were considered generalizable? Would you have to rate all your lovers on a) validity and b) reliability? And would you decide on first, second and third authors before you started, or would you just do it alphabetically?

3 comments:

Tabula Rasa said...

if you're raising concerns about validity, it's important to look at all sorts:
a) external
b) internal
c) construct
d) statistical conclusion (you know, the 36-24 stuff)

plus you mustn't forget the nomological net.

DoZ said...

Btw, there are plenty of "scientific minded" researchers out there - like this one: http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/10/04/stripper_tips/index.html?source=rss&aim=broadsheet

Anonymous said...

This is too easy. I'm not even going to try.

n!