Longitudinal Biases Against Corrective Actions

• Published in: Archives of scientific psychology 2018-12, Vol.6 (1), p.243-250
• Main Authors: Larzelere, Robert E, Lin, Hua, Payton, Mark E, Washburn, Isaac J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis of Covariance; Analysis of Variance; Assistance (Social Behavior); Causal Analysis; Child Discipline; Economics; Homework; Inference; Longitudinal Studies; Personnel Training; Prognosis; Project Head Start
• ISSN: 2169-3269; 2169-3269
• DOI: 10.1037/arc0000052

ABSTRACT Parents turn to corrective actions when they want to correct problematic behaviors they see in their children. Many scientific evaluations of corrective actions are misleading. Consider the example of talking to youth about the dangers of smoking. Parents may talk about that when they suspect their children are smoking. Longitudinal evaluations have shown that youth are more likely to smoke cigarettes this year if their parents warned them of its dangers last year. Does this mean that talking about the dangers of smoking made them more likely to try smoking? Or is this because parents often correctly suspected that their children were already smoking? Many scientific evaluations cannot tell the difference. This article shows that typical statistical analyses fail to isolate the actual effect of such corrective actions by parents, which explains why psychological research rarely concludes that any corrective actions by parents are effective. Such corrective actions include disciplinary corrective actions for defiance, helping with homework, and talking about the dangers of unprotected sex. Corrective actions by psychotherapists, educators, and physicians would also appear ineffective or even harmful if evaluated by the same statistical methods used to evaluate corrective actions by parents. This article's purpose is to make psychological researchers more aware of this problem. It would help if researchers also used another statistical method that is not biased against corrective actions, but this would not guarantee accurate conclusions about whether corrective actions are actually accomplishing what parents are intending. SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACT Corrective actions are inherently confounded with the problems they are intended to correct. Adverse outcomes of a corrective action are therefore due to an unknown combination of the poor prognosis of the original problem and the effect of the corrective action in modifying that prognosis for better or for worse. Early evaluations of Head Start and job training programs highlighted this problem, but lessons from those examples have not influenced research in psychology as broadly as in economics. An increasing number of statistically controlled longitudinal studies have found adverse effects of corrective actions by parents, including corrective disciplinary actions, homework assistance, and talking to youth against deviant actions and peers. Similar longitudinal analyses of empirically supported corrective a