Dubious Student Help

Our agency gets volunteer student workers from a local work-study program that helps train kids aged about 16-19, most of whom are high school drop-outs, in a variety of vocational areas so that they can get jobs. I use some of these students to help me with survey projects and overall, their (free) assistance has been critical to completing them. For instance, I am fortunate to get many of the best typing specialists to do data entry for a survey project in which they have, to date, completed perhaps 20,000 surveys with a high degree of accuracy.

However, sometimes I'm not so lucky on the workers I get.

The most spectacular case of incompetence was a student assigned to help me with a survey mailout. The first step of this mailout was to take a survey (single sheet of 8x11 paper) and fold it in thirds. Folding a paper exactly in thirds does require some judgment, so I showed the students that if they made the first fold at a particular point in the paper, they could be ensured that the paper would fold into even thirds, and I demonstrated the folding technique I wanted them to use. Simple enough, right? But one student had a serious problem with this. He took the edge of his paper, lined it up where I had shown him, pushed down on the folded edge of the paper in a general way with his hand, and then released it, whereupon the paper immediately completely unfolded because he did not understand that he had to crease the paper to keep it folded. Um, O-K, I thought, but I have worked with some one-step-above-a-rock students before and explicitly explained about the creasing step while showing the technique again. He tried again, still couldn't get it about creasing the paper, and the paper flopped open. I was starting to wonder if the kid was just screwing with me or what and looked him in the eye, seeing the blankest, stupidest look I believe I have ever seen on a human being. I said, OK, wait here for a minute, and went to call the woman who oversees the student worker program for our agency. When I told her what had happened, she sighed, apologized, and said with no surprise, I had hoped that this job wouldn't be beyond him. She came to get him and set him on who knows what task - holding a desk onto the floor with his head, possibly.

This week, we were doing a big survey preparation job that involved sequential numbering of surveys by hand (to give each survey a unique ID). As I told the students, this is a simple enough job that the real danger is that you stop paying attention, let your mind wander, and lose your place, which I find myself doing pretty often, so it's important to keep checking that you're on track. This is the 9th of these numbering jobs we've done, and in all that time, I've never had a student with a serious problem with the numbering. Until now. I had hired a temp worker to work with and oversee the students on this project, and when I went to do a final reckoning on the surveys after everything was finished, to ensure that the final number for each batch of surveys matched what I expected, I discovered that one student was startlingly innumerate. Not once, not twice, but three times he numbered the surveys 1000-1099, 2000-2099, 3000. Fortunately, his incompetence was matched by his inefficiency and lack of work ethic, so I was able to fix his mistakes in about 45 minutes.

I haven't determined any obvious pattern in ability, effectiveness, professionalism, or personality among students by gender or ethnicity, except that the smart-ass kids, somewhat smarter than the training center average, who shout "fuck-up" rather than "disadvantaged youth" are always Anglo guys. These guys really enjoy standing around trying to involve me in lengthy conversations to doing any actual work. Favorite topics thus far have included:

• His poetry, which he wanted me to read, and which was perhaps not wretched by the standards of a 16 year old boy who dropped-out of school, but was still rather more painful than I could tolerate. The one I did read was about a rose or something. At least it didn't involve the violent death of himself or those who misunderstood him, etc.
• His plans for starting a gaming software company with a friend.
• The dramas of his coming out to his family and friends and his continuing problems with his boyfriend who is back home, not at the training center (which has a live-in dorm).
• His desire for a sex change operation (90% sure he was fucking with me).
• How well he did at college (all complete and obvious bullshit).

More Math Assignment Grades

Assignments 3 - 5:
99, 88, 100.

The 88 was on the section "The precise definition of limits" (finding the e such that d or whatever that is that I've already basically forgotten). I had expected that I would get some of that wrong, so I'm okay with an 88. Fortunately, except for the tests, I will not have to use that stuff ever again. Right? Right?! I think it's better that I totally clobbered the assignment on "The derivative."

Time is Not All They Lack

When you see a quantitative survey on outdoor recreation in general or focused on a particular activity, the primary reason that participants do not participate more frequently or that the un-engaged do not participate at all (aside from “lack of interest” for weird activities like hunting) is almost always “lack of time.” I could paper my cube and half the others in my area with papers that report this finding. But when it comes to understanding what “lack of time” means, and what anyone can do about it, the data are pretty sketchy. Fundamentally, it is just another way of saying that in the competition for a person’s time, outdoor recreation loses out to other priorities. This ambiguity in the meaning and significance of “lack of time” is why a major objective for the hunter focus groups we will be having this summer is to disentangle this complex idea. I think “lack of time” is also frequently used as a convenient, socially acceptable response either when people haven’t thought the thing through very well or when they don’t want to say what the true reason is (e.g. my wife makes my life such hell when I want to go hunting all season that it just isn’t worth it; I can’t afford a $1,500 deer lease).

It appears to be “common knowledge” not only at my organization but among people in general that Americans are working longer hours than ever, with less free time to spend on leisure. However, the social science literature doesn’t support that folk belief. For example, a recent paper that analyzes time use diary data of non-retired people from 1965 through 2003 has found that for four different operational definitions of “leisure time” (broadly, not including market work, household work, time obtaining human capital – i.e. education, time in health care, or any transportation time associated with these activities), leisure time has actually increased for both men and women over this period. The average man has about 8 hours of additional leisure time per week, which is driven by fewer hours at work. The average woman has about 6 additional hours per week; even though women are spending more hours in the workforce, that time is more than offset by reductions in time spent on household work. They also found that people with greater educational attainment have less leisure time than those with less education, suggesting that there is a leisure gap that runs in the opposite direction of the income gap.

Another study (citation below) focusing on gender differences with respect to free time has some interesting findings (which I will quote here basically verbatim):

• Overall, men do have more free time than women (about half an hour per day).
• Free time for women is more often “contaminated” by other activities or the presence of children.
• Marriage, having preschoolers, and hours of employment inhibit free time among women.
• Number of children and hours of employment – but not marriage – inhibit free time among men.
• Furthermore, men experience greater subjective net benefit from free time than women do. (Among women, feelings of time pressure are not as strongly reduced by an increase in the amount of free time.)
  

One nifty calculation in the study shows free time for men and women based on their regression models. The average amount of free time for men in a day is 5:36 and for women is 5:08. However, if men “experienced life” as women do and women “experienced life” as men do (i.e. applied men’s coefficients to women and women’s coefficients to men), the average man’s daily free time would be 4:49 and the average woman’s would be 6:08.

(Source: Marybeth Mattingly and Suzanne Bianchi. 2003. Gender Differences in the Quantity and Quality of Free Time: The U.S. Experience. Social Forces 81: 999-1030.)

So there appears to be a paradoxical co-existence of a quantitative increase in free time and a qualitative increase in time pressure, particularly among women.

The reduction in household work has made a huge difference in the lives of women. I have spoken to older women who have testified to the way housekeeping has changed in their lifetimes. Presumably this overall reduction in time spent on housework arises from a combination of increasing use of time- and labor-saving technologies (e.g. microwaveable meals, restaurant take-out, dry cleaners, day care for children, domestic help such as cleaning or yard work services, plastic diapers, Roomba) and a lowering of housekeeping standards (e.g. such that the house no longer is maintained at the level where the Queen of England could drop in on a moment’s notice and the white glove test is utterly abandoned). But I wonder: do many women still judge themselves by their grandmothers’ standards of housekeeping? It seems plausible to me that many women are forgoing housework but still worrying about the chores they are not doing. And many women clearly feel the stress of playing multiple roles: working woman with job responsibilities equal to a man, manager of the hacienda, and primary caretaker of children. It’s hard to tease out how much of this is due to social pressures (from society at large or more immediate friends and family) and how much is (at least to some degree) voluntary. I have to admit, I have known women at places I have worked who take on crazily large responsibilities for all elements of what is going on at home even though they have jobs equal to (or greater than) their husbands or, rarely, have husbands who are staying home with the children full-time. I get the sense that some of them don’t trust their husbands to do things right or don’t want to hand over the power that comes with being the person in charge. But I assume the majority of them have been more or less forced into it due to gender roles.

Also, these diary studies only measure the amount of time spent in different areas. It is unclear to me whether the nature of work time and free time has changed since 1965. Are our work hours more stressful and mentally taxing, making people more worn out during their leisure time and hence apt to go for the easy thing (e.g. plopping in front of the TV) rather than pursue activities that would be more refreshing and that they would ultimately get more benefit from? Is our leisure time more fragmented now that people are increasingly “on call” for work even during leisure time or less capable (willing?) to leave the job at the office door? (If the stereotypes are true, we would expect this bleed-over more frequently among women, who tend to be less prone to compartmentalizing.)

And for those of us in the recreation field, how relevant is the change to more structured activities for children? How about the increased availability of electronic media and other sedentary activities? How about the over-protectiveness of parents who are so sensitive to the Stranger Danger issue that they are happier when their kids are upstairs vegging in front of a screen and not out in the world doing something physical?

Factoid of the Day: The 2005 American Time Use Study reports that the average adult spends 2.6 hours per day watching television and only 20 minutes participating in sports, exercise, or recreation. (For me, the amount of time watching TV – on DVD – is almost entirely a subset of the time spent exercising. I heart my treadmill.)

An Odd Juxtaposition

One of Robert's co-workers shared this photograph taken on Easter in Temple, about one hour north of Austin. I must say this isn't a combination I have ever seen before. We have the bluebonnets and the Indian paintbrush, but none of the snow.

Altered Survey Controversy in Austin

It's not often that I have the opportunity to discuss a scandal in the customer satisfaction survey business, where primary controversies surround such thrilling issues as whether 7 point Likert scales can be treated as interval level data for the purposes of running parametric tests. The local newspaper reports that the head of the Austin Convention Center Department was fired last week for falsifying the results of a customer service survey; apparently the department had an annual bonus structure that used the results of the survey as a measure of performance. That's a sort of bizarre use of a c-sat survey anyway, especially one that is administered and analyzed in-house; I wonder who it was that put that mechanism in place. I was very surprised to read that they had bonus money totalling over $400,000 for about 200 employees. Where would the money have gone if they hadn't gotten their bonus? The survey itself looks fairly mediocre (though not criminally so); I'm particularly fond of the declarative sentence of a question that reads, with great vagueness and passive voice construction:

12. Your comments are valued. (Use reverse side for additional comments if needed.)

But fear not: there is, so far as I can tell, absolutely nothing riding on the customer service survey that I was putting together today for my agency. In the fall, we will send in our report to the state and somebody will put a big check mark next to the task "Agency submitted customer service survey results [of questionable validity and little significance]" and that will be the end of it.

In my previous life, I had a client company (Who Will Not Be Named) that used the weighted results of their multi-country, cross-platform awareness and purchase surveys to allocate yearly bonuses among their various regional directors and product managers. I still cannot believe that I did not murder on the spot the programmer who one year came to me after I had calculated and sent the final spreadsheet of results to the client and said, oops he had kind of screwed up some of the labeling of the European countries.

Math Update

Mailing the university extension office about not hearing from my instructor got results - I had a response from him and grades for my first two homework assignments (97, 100) by the evening. I'm wondering whether the fact that people can start up the class at any time means that the instructor sometimes has a new student for a period of time without noticing. He may not be in the habit of checking for messages if he doesn't have a current student. There's no way for me to tell how many other people, if any, are enrolled in the same course as I am.

And yes, he said the proof in the study guide was wrong and sent me the corrected version, which made complete sense.

I have three more completed assignments ready to mail tomorrow. Plus another one that will have to wait until next week.

She Eats Like a Horse Who Eats Chocolate

A few days ago I finished reading a book with a primary female character who had the strangely common and rather annoying characteristic of being able to eat gargantuan quantities of food while maintaining a perfectly slender wisp of a figure. The first time I really noticed this phenomenon was as a teenager reading Martha Grimes’ fun but utterly static Richard Jury mystery series, in which the ever-brooding Richard Jury is regularly being heavily come on to by his ravishingly sexy young (but fully adult) neighbor who always seems to appear with a plate of brownies or a gallon of ice cream or some other implausibly large sweet that she consumes in its entirety.

At the time, I thought this was just a defining feature of that particular character – a way for the author to display that her physical “appetites” are voracious and thereby frightening to the melancholy, pensive, and passive (though intelligent, ultra-handsome, and completely single) Richard Jury, who somehow manages to never sleep with this woman (or any other) despite having every opportunity. (It occurs to me that Jury is similar to Angel from Buffy & the Vampire Slayer in many ways, except Jury can go out and walk the lonely rainy streets of the city during the day, and having sex is not going to literally turn him into an evil monster, although you couldn’t tell that by his inexplicably monkish behavior. My best guess is that Grimes recognizes that a certain kind of loyal female fan believes deeply that if only she were to appear in Jury’s life… etc., and Grimes thus keeps him unattached to prevent these women from becoming jealous and sending her hate mail. Or it could just be that Grimes is totally incapable of developing a character in any way whatsoever.) But since then, I have encountered it so many times that I have come to recognize it as a standard fantasy. I’ve seen it in books written by both men and women, though I think it is slightly more common in ones that are targeted to a disproportionately female audience. However, I’ve been surprised at the number of thrillers written by men with male protagonists and a generally male sensibility that feature a woman with this characteristic in the role of “hot woman the hero will soon start fucking.”

Although this character does not rise to the level of Wacky Neighbor, Token Religious Black Woman (about which more later), Amazingly Resourceful Friend (you know, how characters in fiction so frequently happen to have a friend who can with almost zero notice arrange, e.g., a wedding ceremony or a set of false identity papers), or Really Stupid Guy, Skinny Woman Who Eats All the Time has made it on my personal list of fictional stereotypes.

I am now mentally prepared that one day I am going to be reading a book in which after a walk on the beach in the tiniest possible bikini, the Skinny Woman Who Eats will go up to the snack bar with Her Man, and she will say “Two cheeseburgers, two large fries, and two chocolate milkshakes… and whatever he is having.”