Be Smart: Live in Greenness

August 27, 2020

I do not want to be skeptical. I do not want to suggest that a study may need what might be called verification. Please, read “Residential Green Space and Child Intelligence and Behavior across Urban, Suburban, and Rural Areas in Belgium: A Longitudinal Birth Cohort Study of Twins.” To add zip to your learning, navigate to a “real” news outfit’s article called “Children Raised in Greener Areas Have Higher IQ, Study Finds.” Notice any significant differences.

First, the spin in the headline. The PLOS article points out that the sample comes from Belgium. How representative is this country when compared to Peru or Syria? How reliable are “intelligence” assessments? What constitutes bad behavior? Are these “qualities” subject to statistically significant variations due to exogenous factors?

I don’t want to do a line by line comparison of the write up which wants to ring the academic gong. Nor do I want to read how “real” journalists deal with a scholarly article.

I would point out this sentence in the scholarly article:

To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the association between residential green space and intelligence in children.

Yeah, let’s not get too excited from a sample of 620 in Belgium. Skip school. Play in a park or wander through thick forests.

Stephen E Arnold, August 27, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Statistics

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.