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The Problem With Hidden Data

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Mom argues that she has witnessed first hand with her own kids, that when they misbehave, and have been spanked they have stopped misbehaving. The problem to explain to mom is that there is a something called “hidden data.” Mom wouldn’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t have spanked her kids when they misbehaved. The problem with hidden data is that you need an X to cause Y. in order to do so, in a case like this, you would need to have a controlled experiment. X would be the “spanking” and Y would be if the kids kept misbehaving or not. This case is missing the X, which would be how Y would have turned out if she hadn’t spanked her kids. There is also a need for a controlled experiment and compare how much more affective …show more content…

If pop would have punished his kids in any other way, would it have had the same affect that spanking had on them? In this case it probably would have, because if punishment had resulted with positive feedback on his children’s behavior, then any type of punishment would have done the job. Since this can be explained without pop actually trying another sort of punishment, this is an easy explanation. It has no supportive explanations, but it is easy for someone to convince someone else that something works simply because it has been a positive outcome for them. Mom objects to this as well, because she says that all her friends have done the same thing as she and pop, and their kids have become productive members of society as well. This would fall under the category of social factors. Birds of a feather is to explain how people tend to associate with people who agree with us, as well as have the same mind set and mentality. Someone might think what they do and think is right, just because they have people around them who agree with the same thing. Pop makes out a good point on the population sample that the study shows on the newspaper. He thinks that all the kids that were part of the study came from a wealthy family. In which case, he mentions that, if you come from a higher social class family, they are less likely to have health, emotional, and behavioral problems. The possibility to the problem in this case would be that the population that was

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