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gabro
10th February 2005, 08:26
This paper will be published shortly in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry.

http://www.uib.no/psyfa/hemil/mobbing/OlwEndPS.pdf

I know that cohort studies are always open for questions, but the results are astonishing, to me at least.

Mads

Amir
10th February 2005, 12:05
Several points to think on after reading the results:

1. Am I the only one who has the feeling the author decided on the result before the study :(

2. In the first section, they quote the results of another article that claimed a significant difference in student violence between traditional teaching and modern competitive teaching of the same style. Yet they included all M.A. in the same section.

3. At least some of the results come from only ~120 subjects (and not only for M.A.). They give lots of reasons for it, but it is still a minor statistics.

Amir

Blackwood
10th February 2005, 14:05
I think the overall report rather interesting in that there were some factores that were not considered.

For instance - What was the norm used for 'antisocial' behavior? Were they comparing the group with those that did no sports, the 'loners' that are so "antisocial" as to not participate in any activity? What was considered an antisocial behavior? Picking a fight? Being mean to someone? Standing up for one's beliefs instead of allowing someone to steam roller over them? Having the confidence to push against the established pattern and try to make change?

And they do acknowledge that the MA was the lowest of the groups studied.

I, too, would be very interested in what the results would have been if they had split out the TMA from the MMA/Sport side of things.

MarkF
10th February 2005, 14:25
1. Am I the only one who has the feeling the author decided on the result before the study


No, you are not. In fact, there is always a motivation for finding one way or another. There is almost always a large dose of opinion going in, and if you are looking for something, you will find it.

Also, this doesn't qualify as a study. It seemingly throws away the results of one while spending more time on the other. That is why you have that feeling. I do not think they tried to hide that very well, but you should not have to hide opinion. Opinion forms the very base of written history, which itself is based in research. Opinions do matter but not necessarily one over the other because you do not like the outcome. Unfortunately, this is very common.

The outcome, well, there really wasn't one, not based on this abstract.


Mark

MikeWilliams
10th February 2005, 14:33
Also, while they acknowledge some demographic limitations (caucasian male kids from Bergen), they don't seem to account for other social, demographic or environmental indicators.

Weight-lifting and boxing showed a higher correllation with anti-social behaviour than oriental MAs for instance - I wonder whether social class distinctions play into this (weight-lifting & boxing possibly being more likely to be practised in areas of social deprivation.)

The findings were interesting, and I'm not that surprised by them. My biggest gripe is with one sentence in the conclusion:
It is obvious that preadolescent and adolescent boys involved in power sports make a very substantial contribution to the level of violence and antisocial behaviour characterising the relevant age groups in society.

Given that boys involved in 'power sports' make up a tiny percentage of the population, the authors are substantially overstating their case. Even if true for the wider population, their findings do not reveal some new 'menace to society'.

If the authors were here right now, I'd smack them one. :D

gabro
10th February 2005, 15:39
Originally posted by MikeWilliams
Also, while they acknowledge some demographic limitations (caucasian male kids from Bergen), they don't seem to account for other social, demographic or environmental indicators.

Weight-lifting and boxing showed a higher correllation with anti-social behaviour than oriental MAs for instance - I wonder whether social class distinctions play into this (weight-lifting & boxing possibly being more likely to be practised in areas of social deprivation.)



I also noticed this, as well as the introduction stating that no conclusions regarding cause and effect can be drawn from the associations discussed. They also admit that the results may at least partly reflect differences in personality established before starting the activities.

Perhaps astonishing was too strong a word, but I did find the results somewhat surprising. Both the Norwegian Judo Federation and the Norwegian Martial Arts Federation (Norges Kampsportforbund) have been using the "good for kids" argument as a selling point, and this paper obviously made the headlines of Norwegian newspapers, possibly making parents think twice about letting their offspring participate in sports. More surprising is perhaps the fact that they made so little of the personality development pre-sport, i.e. would someone be likely to take up martial arts because they allready had a tendency to violence, or did they become violent because of martial arts. Although, how you would adress this in a study I don't know.

On a purely anecdotal level, coaching kids in Judo over a period of 8-10 years, the kids that ended up in trouble would have done so without the Judo background, and that overall we had very few problems.

Mads

will szlemko
16th February 2005, 15:21
Hi all,

As a grad student working on a PhD in research based social psychology, researching aggression I note the following. In addition to the critiques already made, it should be noted that the statistics they used on their data were at best not optimal and at worst were the wrong statistics. Additionally there were a couple of methodological flaws in the study that should have negated anything they found. Perhaps this is why it is being published in the jorunal it is being published in rather than one of the many journals about aggression (or could be that they think their inappropriate conclusions drawn from a poor study have some relevance for counseling and clinical psychologists).

will