Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

Oh, wow. What a flawed study. I'll have to take more of a look at this after I've worked on my homework. First off, there's the classic mistake of correlation implying casuality. It does not. If that were so, I would conclude that the number of transexual hooker ads in Philly's City Paper predicted the stock market. I actually did a quickie spreadsheet on this and there is a correlation, but I have a hard time seeing a causality. Just because you have two trends moving in phase does not mean that one is dependent on the other. In my suitably ludicris example here, my guess is that the stock market drives the hooker ads because well heeled pervs have more money during a bull market. Environment is a tougher nut to crack still. First off, how do you know someone is homosexual? They have to tell you, volunteer for your study, or your previous work has to have proved telepathy and produced 100% reliable telepaths. So your sample is self selected. Even if you did a longitudinal study of several thousand people from all over a nation, following them from childhood through adulthood, you rely on the fact that your study group has told your their orientation. This is problematic because people in the closet are often in there for good reason. The other thing going on with sexuality in urban areas is the strength of weak ties, referring to Granovetter's seminal paper on social networks. Strong ties are your family and long time friends. Weak ties are your co-workers and other less familiar people. Strong tied networks tend to share the same information and thus do not provide transformative information. Weak ties, tie people of different classes and backgrounds together through their day to day interactions and their heterogenity means that diverse types of information are shared. While Granovetter studied this with regard to socioeconomic standing, I bet this obtains in matters of sexuality. If you know you're attracted to members of the same sex in a small town, chances are your perception of these feelings will stay rooted in the teachings of your church and the expectations of your family. If these institutions teach that homosexuality is negative, then you will struggle with your feelings and probably keep them hidden. If you live in a city, your weak ties will stand a better chance of putting you in touch with others who have the same feelings. Maybe you'd come to the conclusion that you're bi, maybe you'll find a partner just like and come to want to get married. But in any case, your understandings will undergo a transformation.