Inductivist

All the noise about Tiger Woods reminded me of a question I wanted to look into: Are married, churchgoing black men less likely to cheat? 

The table (GSS data) shows the percent of married black guys who have ever cheated by church attendance. The variable ATTEND produced cells with very small sample sizes, so I collapsed them into three categories: rarely (never attends to once a year); occasionally (several times a year to 2-3 times a month); and often (nearly every week to more than weekly). This strategy puts roughly one-third of men into each category.

While men who attend occasionally are not significantly less likely to cheat than those who attend rarely, frequent churchgoers have significantly lower rates. Rare attenders are almost 1 1/2 times more likely to be unfaithful.

This sort of analysis cannot identify cause and effect, but there is evidence here that if you're married to a black man who goes to church all the time, you've got better odds that he's not fooling around. I'm particularly impressed with this fact, given that one meets many fine women at church.  

Inductivist hits a thousand: This blog has now reached the milestone of one thousand posts. Of those, perhaps 700 or so have been data analyses, and my plan is to continue to anger the folks at the National Opinion Research Center (GSS people) by answering all the wrong questions with their data.

But let's mark the occasion with something amusing that just happened to me. After finishing his test, a black student came up to me a laid his exam on top of the stack and then proceded to ask me a long list of questions about the online course he was also taking from me. I turned away from him to pull up his information on the computer, but after a second turned my head back and he was leaning over the top of his exam and had his arms around the stack to hide the fact that he was trying to write on his exam. I told him to stay away from the test; you can't touch it after you've turned it in. He denied touching anything, but it was obvious to me that he had quickly looked at the answers on the first page of the test beneath his before placing his on top, then he had started to ask me questions about the other course so I would turn my back, so he could change his answers. He wasn't even listening to what I saying about his online course.

After he left, I looked at his test and saw that four true-false questions had been changed on the first page and thought, "The bastard has got me because I didn't actually see him change his answers, and he, of course, would claim he changed them before turning in the exam." Then I looked closer and laughed because all four answers were now wrong! He had gone to all this trouble to cheat right under my nose, and his original answers were correct! It's like I always tell my students: Don't cheat off your neighbor because chances are, he's dumber than you are.