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CHAPTER 4: Observation 111BOX 4.3THE SCIENCE OF FREAKONOMICSDo school teachers cheat on tests so that they andtheir students will look good?Do police really lower crime rates?Why does capital punishment not deter criminals?Which is more dangerous to your child: the family owninga swimming pool or a gun?Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?What’s the best way to catch a terrorist?Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it’s soineffective?These questions, and others, were asked by themaverick social scientist, Steven D. Levitt, in hisbest-selling books, Freakonomics and Super-Freakonomics (Levitt & Dubner, 2005; 2009). Theanswers he gives come from archival analyses ofstudent test scores, sports records, crime statistics,birth and death statistics, and much more.We won’t give away all the answers based on thisclever researcher’s mining of society’s archives,but we will say that in this era of high-stakes testing,public school teachers sometimes cheat, andif you own both a gun and a swimming pool, yourchild is 100 times more likely to die by drowningthan by gunplay.Key Conceptmeasures, including archival data. Acts of terrorism such as 9/11, drastic economicevents such as the worldwide economic collapse in 2008, and the enactmentof new laws and reforms are examples of the kinds of events thatmay have important effects on behavior and can be investigated using archivaldata. Also, individuals experience naturally occurring events in their lives,such as death or divorce of parents, chronic illness, or relationship difficulties.The effects of these events can be explored using archival data. For example,a researcher may examine school records of absenteeism or grades to investigatechildren’s responses to parental divorce. Similarly, Friedman et al. (1995)and Tucker et al. (1997) used archival data available from a longitudinal studybegun in 1921 on a sample of 1,500 children. By also examining death recordsyears later for individuals in the original sample, these investigators were ableto determine that parental divorce was associated with earlier death for individualsin the study.Researchers gain several practical advantages by using archival records.Archival data are plentiful and researchers can avoid an extensive data collectionstage—data are simply waiting for researchers! Also, because archivalinformation is often part of the public record and usually does not identifyindividuals, ethical concerns are less worrisome. As more and more archivalsources become available through the Internet, researchers will find it eveneasier to examine behavior in this way (see Box 4.3).Researchers, however, need to be aware of the problems and limitations of archivalrecords. Two problems are selective deposit and selective survival (see Webbet al., 1981). These problems occur because there are biases in how archives areproduced. Selective deposit occurs when some information is selected to bedeposited in archives, but other information is not. For example, consider thatgreat archive, the high school yearbook. Not all activities, events, and groups areselected to appear in the yearbook. Who decides what is prominently displayed