Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

162 P. Smeyers
to be told. Moreover, though we may be familiar with the possible objections and
take these ‘warnings’ into account, this does not really change the fact that we often
unthinkingly rely on what is presented to us. Why is that the case, or in other words,
what do statistics do for us that make them so irresistible?
Consider for instance the following abstract which was sent around recently
to the staff of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, K.U.Leuven.
The abstract was for a talk to be given by Peter Wilhelm (University of Fribourg,
Switzerland) titled ‘How to Assess Synchronization in Family Members’ Daily
Life?’
How family members affect each other’s feelings and behaviours is a crucial question in
family and social psychology. To answer this question, ambulatory assessment techniques
that capture family members’ experiences and behaviours in their usual daily life over days
or weeks are especially useful. To date various diary studies have been conducted to investigate
transmission of affects in couples and in parent-child dyads. However, diary studies
to investigate the synchronization of current affects in entire families are rare. The aim of
our research was to investigate the extent to which family members’ current moods synchronize
in their usual daily life and how this synchronization can be explained. Using
a computer-assisted diary approach, six times a day over the course of a week we asked
192 parents and 122 adolescent children from 96 Swiss families how they were feeling,
where they were, with whom they were, and whether they had experienced conflicts with
each other. To answer our research questions we propose a multilevel approach in which
the similarity between family members’ average mood (trait component) and the similarity
between their current mood (state component) is reflected in the covariances of the random
part of the model. Using this approach we were able to show that average mood was moderately
correlated among family members. As expected, family members’ current mood (state
component) was more similar when they were together, than when they were apart. This
indicates that family members’ mood synchronizes when they come together. By extending
the analyses we could explain the amount of synchronization by shared setting factors that
have an impact on mood, such as location, activity, and time of the day. However, conflicts
between the family members produced the largest decreases in the covariances and therefore
seem to contribute most to the synchronization of current mood in family members’
daily life.
It may be fun to speculate about the practical consequences of the insights this
study comes up with, i.e. the family members’ mood synchronizes when they come
together especially when they have conflicts. Has it thus been established that one
should test a relation to its destruction or has a more general argument been developed
in favour of quality time? A positive reading may indicate that the latter is
obviously the case – we need to spend time together if we desire synchronization of
current affects in families. Though this seems rather obvious, this research can substantiate
it. Granted, this does not go very far, but at least it provides insight into how
an issue in family and social psychology is dealt with. It provides answers and takes
us beyond mere speculation in regard to something we may be (really) interested
in (how things are). The following abstract of a talk by Jeff Rouder (University of
Missouri-Columbia) for another seminar at the same Faculty, titled ‘Using Bayesian
hierarchical models to search for structure in recognition memory’, is much more
straightforward when indicating what, according to its author, is at stake: