May 18 2000, 810 words
A crucial difference between the sciences and the humanities is this: science researchers look at a set of facts and formulate a theory that fits the facts, whereas humanities researchers formulate a theory and try to find facts to fit it.
The latter approach is well displayed in a paper published in the Easter edition of the Trinidad and Tobago Review, which questions the link between juvenile delinquency and single-mother households. Written by Catherine Ali and Cheryl Lans, they conclude that "the association between the increase in juvenile delinquency and female headed, single-mother households is not a valid one because identifying a group is not the same as determining a relationship between its cause and occurrence."
This is the same argument used by tobacco companies to explain away the statistical correlation between lung cancer and cigarettes. Ali and Lans, admittedly, have a more laudable objective: they want to prevent people blaming single mothers for raising juvenile delinquents. But good intentions pave the road to bogus research even more thickly than the one to Hell.
While the conclusions Ali and Lans arrive at may be quite correct, there is absolutely no data to support them. And the funny thing is, they admit it, writing, "Assuming we receive a research grant to study juvenile delinquency, how should we conduct the research?"
Having no real evidence, Ali and Lans depend mainly on rejecting the theoretical approaches which have linked single-mother homes and juvenile delinquents. But their criticisms are based almost entirely on ideological grounds, which is worse than no grounds at all. "We have questioned the sexist assumptions, the inadequate methods, and faulty conclusions," they declare, blissfully unaware of committing all these sins themselves.
They assert, for example, that "This research methodology began with Western sociology being imposed on Caribbean contexts and continues today, reified by local researchers, long after its abandonment by the West." Yet they quote a Barbadian study where respondents were asked what they thought were the causes of crime, and conclude that "This research proves the point that there are multiple reasons for juvenile delinquency and that the type of family is only one (and not the largest) factor."
Me, I thought modern researchers had long stopped using personal testimony as hard proof. But maybe it works in the Caribbean and nowhere else in the world.
Ali and Lans even reach conclusions which seem diametrically opposed to the very data they quote. In one Jamaican study, 80 percent of children with behavioural problems were living without parents, with 76 percent viewing their fathers as negative role models. In a comparison group of children without behavioural problems, 80 percent lived with parents and only 23 percent considered their fathers to be poor role models. Yet, by some unexplained sleight-of-hand, this study concludes that there was no statistical difference in the children in both groups in homes where the father was present or absent.
But it is when Lans and Ali apply their leftist feminist ideology that they get really absurd. "The Caribbean social-gender system...was built on an imported Western ideology of masculinity and femininity...," they write. This statement is based on the assumption that sexual attitudes are determined mainly by culture, rather than biology. The anthropological data, however, shows that, politically speaking, sex roles are basically the same in all societies. But Lans and Ali don't know about comparative ethnography, and so also write, "Unwed mothers have been viewed as victims and delinquents - a first step towards controlling their sexuality", as though marriage wasn't a form of property transfer (and still is in many cultures) and the main method by which men control women's sexuality in all societies.
"Feminist theory focuses on defining gender inequality, rather than single-parent families, as the cause of juvenile delinquency," they write, concluding that economic and social policy, education, housing and the court system are some of the factors contributing to juvenile delinquents coming mainly from single-mother households.
They may be right. But their ideological bias disallows even the possibility that single-motherhood may be a key factor in juvenile delinquency. And, when you cut through all the academic double-speak, the simple fact is that Lans and Ali can prove - or disprove - their case only by doing a proper comparison between two-parent households and single-parent, and extended female-headed, ones. And maybe if they get funding, they will.
In the meantime, they may find these words from behavioural geneticist David Lykken edifying: "More than two-thirds of abused children, juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, pregnant teenagers, homeless persons, adult criminals, were raised without the participation of their biological fathers. Calculated separately for white and black youngsters, it can be shown that a fatherless boy is seven times more likely to be incarcerated as delinquent than a boy raised by both biological parents."
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh