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Halfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to addres

Halfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home. If kids in the 90th percentile for their country (for number of books in their home) have less similar outcomes than kids with the same number of books (from different countries), this would be indicative that the books that actually matter." If that point is in the article, though, it's sure not in Smithsonian's article, and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original. :(

SamReidHughes 8y ago
I'll bet you equally good correlations can be found when the parents have a Kindle library that the kid doesn't have access to. You'd expect articles like this to have a paragraph, "The researchers controlled for biological heredity by ________" but it seems they don't want you to take them seriously. Edit: Oh, they also show that growing up in a home full of books makes you more numerate, too. So, no surprise, there's a general intelligence factor involved that has nothing to do with books.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home Per the abstract to the original article, they didn't need to address parental education as a confounding factor by such an indirect means, since parental education (as well as the subject’s education and occupation) was one of the directly studied factors, and the library size contribution existed even after taking those other factors into account. > and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original. Well, yeah, I'd like more than just the abstract and secondhand reporting, too.

SamReidHughes 8y ago

I'll bet you equally good correlations can be found when the parents have a Kindle library that the kid doesn't have access to. You'd expect articles like this to have a paragraph, "The researchers controlled for biological heredity by ________" but it seems they don't want you to take them seriously. Edit: Oh, they also show that growing up in a home full of books makes you more numerate, too. So, no surprise, there's a general intelligence factor involved that has nothing to do with books.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home Per the abstract to the original article, they didn't need to address parental education as a confounding factor by such an indirect means, since parental education (as well as the subject’s education and occupation) was one of the directly studied factors, and the library size contribution existed even after taking those other factors into account. > and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original. Well, yeah, I'd like more than just the abstract and secondhand reporting, too.