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Igel

(36,333 posts)
2. The silence of the typically barking dog is deafening.
Mon Oct 14, 2013, 07:49 PM
Oct 2013

It looks at private insurance. Period.

That means it's looking at a subgroup of the insured. There's no controlling for the parents of these kids, and parents and home life account for a greater variance in academic achievement than schools.

For example--no more than that--I've never had a minimum wage, part-time, short-term job that provided health insurance. All the full-time permanent jobs that required more education or dedication had health insurance, provided or subsidized. All this is to show is that in many cases the presence or absence of private insurance isn't random. Those who have private insurance in the US tend to be better educated, work full time, are more likely to be in a committed relationship. I'd guess that they're also more likely to be legal residents (not "a legal person who resides", but "a person who resides legally&quot or citizens. Even if Latino.

These go to their home life, their SES. Yet the parents are considered irrelevant. They're not controlled for. There's hope in the abstract, but the article dispels such fluff.

This means that the researchers have excluded something that others have said is very important, and have presented the correlation they found as causal ("effects" isn't so much an implication as an explicit claim). Instead, health insurance status might be as dependent as academic achievement on more basic factor.

This laxness and motivated, goal-centered reasoning and research wouldn't fly in my field even among fairly goal-centered researchers. They'd at least make a pretense of checking competing theories that could, with barely a gesture, cause dismissal of their claims by any but the truest of believers. Any peer reviewer worth his salt would have said, "Go take this other factor into account, beginning graduate student. And tell your future PhD advisor to scrub behind your ears before sending you to bed." In lesser PhD programs, it would have counted as a publishable paper to allow advancement to candidacy and been included in a working-papers volume. In better PhD programs or post-doc programs, not even.

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