Utah as a hellscape for women and children

[drumdude]

Over at the usual blog, the proprietor has found and reposted the following demographic visualization:

I have to give the creator (Dan doesn't tell us who that is) of the image kudos for ensuring that Utah stood out in its' own color for dramatic effect. Here's a bit more balanced view of the same data:




Utah does indeed lead the nation in many categories, most notably it has the fewest parents smoking around their children. But it's not all roses:

Utah has a lot of bullied children:


Utah ranks low on child flourishing metrics:


Utah is towards the bottom on child insurance rankings:


Utah children are often not receiving the mental health care they need:


Which is a big problem when Utah leads with childhood depression and anxiety:


Utah also has a big problem with sweets, which seems to be showing up in the high rates of cavities in children:



Data is fun. Since the proprietor is currently writing a book, I highly recommend he start diving into it rather than merely reposting other people's [uncited] work.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

“I always start out with an assumption that the Afore, and anything else that we get from the Interpreter Foundation is a lie... Therefore, any evidence I find, I will try to fit into that paradigm." — Kerry Muhlestein

[Marcus]

Peterson's posts are a constant reminder that to him, image matters over substance.

[I Have Questions]

That’s good fact checking drumdude. It’s a shame that Peterson is too lazy to look into the reality of data before making grand conclusions.

[I Have Questions]

I think this is the article from which Peterson copy/pasted the graphic in the OP:

Brad Wilcox: I’ve been developing an index of family strength with my colleague, Nicholas Zill, and we’re finding that Utah is No. 1 when it comes to family strength in America. There’s no state, for instance, that has more kids who are being raised in intact families than Utah — about 70% of Utah children are raised in stable, married families. As you think about your state’s family strength, how does it relate to your own estimation to your state’s economic performance? I’m thinking particularly of the ways your state has been rated strongly on a number of economic measures, including mobility for poor kids.

Brad has taken over a project studying marriage and turned it into something that aims to draw targets around already fallen cherry picked arrows to justify the Church's position on same sex marriage and other co-habitative living arrangements that differ from what the Church now terms "traditional marriage'.

Spencer Cox: So, this is really interesting, and we love the work that Brad is doing here at UVA. Fifteen months ago, U.S. News & World Report conducted rankings of the states, and they looked at over 1,000 different data points, 70 different categories, and they ranked all 50 states objectively for best states to live overall. Utah came out No. 1 for the second year in a row. We’ve had the best economy in the nation by most metrics over the past 10 years. We led the nation in GDP growth, led the nation in population growth in the last census, and I could go on and on.

I followed the link to "the work" Brad is doing...

History
The National Marriage Project was founded in 1997 by Rutgers University Sociology Professor David Popenoe. From 1997 to the summer of 2009, it was housed at Rutgers University and was directed by Drs. Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. In the summer of 2009, the National Marriage Project moved to the University of Virginia, where it is now directed by W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Mission
The National Marriage Project (NMP) is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and interdisciplinary initiative located at the University of Virginia. The Project’s mission is to provide research and analysis on the health of marriage in America, to analyze the social and cultural forces shaping contemporary marriage, and to identify strategies to increase marital quality and stability. Pursuant to its mission, the NMP has five goals:

Publish The State of Our Unions, which monitors the current health of marriage and family life in America;
Investigate and report on the state of marriage among young adults;
Provide accurate information and analysis regarding marriage to journalists, policy makers, religious leaders, and the general public—especially young adults;
Conduct research on the ways in which children, race, class, immigration, ethnicity, religion, and poverty shape the quality and stability of contemporary marriage; and
Bring marriage and family experts together to develop strategies for strengthening marriage.

https://nationalmarriageproject.org

In summary, The Church via Brad, is seeking to control the narrative on marriage, using selective reasoning (as Marcus has ably shown above by digging into the data a little bit) and lobbying journalists, politicians, and other senior figures to adopt policies that fit what the Church wants to see.

The project team have done groundbreaking work on marriage already such as:

What Does Couple Time Tell Us About the Potential Value of Date Nights?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Only About Half of Couples Go on Frequent Date Nights

In the second edition of The Date Night Opportunity, we examined the links between one-on-one couple time and relationship quality with data from a new survey, “The State of Our Unions Survey,” of 2,000 married, heterosexual men and women aged 18-55 in the United States. In the survey conducted by YouGov for the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute in the Fall of 2022, respondents were asked, “How often do you do the following: Go on date nights where you have a chance to talk, catch up, and do something fun with your spouse?”

52% of husbands and wives reported they “never” go out on date nights with their spouses or only went on date nights “a few times a year.”
48% had date nights “one or twice a month” or more frequently than that.

https://nationalmarriageproject.org/202 ... pportunity
You'll note the project team limited their survey sample to "married, heterosexual men and women aged 18-55 in the United States".

This project now starts with the conclusion - The Church is right, Heterosexual Marriage is the best. And is now doing selective surveys to show their conclusion is correct. It's like Vegans drawing the conclusion that Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner is bad, and then only surveying Turkeys for their opinion.

I'm surprised the University of Virginia has allowed their name to be attached to this type of religious confirmation bias.

[I Have Questions]

This is the background to the project prior to Brad stepping up to continue "the work".

David Popenoe, a sociology professor at Rutgers University, has a radical idea. He thinks children should live with both their biological parents.

When his father, Paul Popenoe, said essentially the same thing decades ago, it wasn't so radical. The elder Popenoe, who died in 1979, was widely recognized as the nation's first marriage counselor. (He started the wildly popular column "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" in The Ladies' Home Journal.) His premise, that parents should stay together, was accepted wisdom then. But when 63-year-old David Popenoe (pronounced POP-uh-no) makes the same case -- as he has, emphatically, in a new book, "Life Without Father" (Free Press) -- he'd better duck.

In a day when the multitudinous forms of family -- step-, half-, single-mother, single-father, gay-couple -- are celebrated in mainstream venues like "Sesame Street," Dr. Popenoe's call for a return to the traditional family has gotten him into all kinds of trouble. And some of his theses are clearly provocative: his assertion that stepfathers are more likely than biological fathers to be a negative, even dangerous, influence on family life; his strong censure of single women who use sperm banks to become pregnant; his bald statement that men and women are different "to the core"; his insistence that it should take both a man and a woman (not a man or a woman alone, or a gay or lesbian couple) to rear a child.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/28/nyre ... ilias.html

Dr. Popenoe bases much of his argument on "evolutionary psychology," a controversial field that attributes behavior to genetic factors and draws on evidence from the animal kingdom. Hence men, who carry millions of sperm, have a biological urge to procreate as often as possible, rather than settle down with a single mate. Whereas women, who have a limited number of eggs, are biologically predisposed to staying with their offspring and seeking the commitment of a protective male.

[Tom]

That’s good fact checking Marcus. It’s a shame that Peterson is too lazy to look into the reality of data before making grand conclusions.

I believe you meant to write drumdude in your first sentence.

[I Have Questions]

That’s good fact checking Marcus. It’s a shame that Peterson is too lazy to look into the reality of data before making grand conclusions.

I believe you meant to write drumdude in your first sentence.

Thank you Tom, you’re quite right. I will correct my post.

[drumdude]

After playing around with the data visualization tools and the information in the surveys, I found it extremely easy to bias the viewer of the graphic by strategically choosing which data to include and how to color it.

For example the data I provided about kids in 2 parent married households covers the whole age range and only shows a variation of between 50-80 percent.

The graphic Dan posted has a narrow age range of only a few years, and has a wider variation of between 30-70 percent. They also added a 3rd color specifically to highlight Utah. The consumer of the data is Mormons, who can have a warm fuzzy feeling of being vindicated with “facts.”

This is why the old saying goes, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

[Marcus]

After playing around with the data visualization tools and the information in the surveys, I found it extremely easy to bias the viewer of the graphic by strategically choosing which data to include and how to color it.

For example the data I provided about kids in 2 parent married households covers the whole age range and only shows a variation of between 50-80 percent.

The graphic Dan posted has a narrow age range of only a few years, and has a wider variation of between 30-70 percent. They also added a 3rd color specifically to highlight Utah. The consumer of the data is Mormons, who can have a warm fuzzy feeling of being vindicated with “facts.”

This is why the old saying goes, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Wow. So he either manipulated the data, or got it from someone who did? That's a great example of what some emeritus BYU professors think of the honor code.