<p>More importantly, WesKid, some of us intentionally chose colleges that have only coed dorms. So even if the students at Conservative U really were placed into their single-sex dorms randomly, it’s not random that they went to Conservative U and you went to Wesleyan.</p>
<p>Usually, if a college offers both co-ed and single-sex dorms, students are allowed to state a preference for one type of dorm or the other.</p>
<p>So if the study excluded students who were in either a co-ed or single-sex dorm by choice, then did it only include those students who were placed contrary to their preference?</p>
<p>Or maybe only those who didn’t get their housing app in on time?</p>
<p>Well I picked single sex all women in college all four years even though it was a time when co-ed was beginning. I think that is why the I was blessed me with all boys 
it was “His” version of Gotcha!</p>
<p>S2’s big state u. gave no choice on specific dorm preference. They were able to choose an area of campus they wanted. S2 (whose housing app. went in in Feb.) ended up in the only all male dorm on campus…def. not his choice. He grew to like it, going so far as to say it was the best in his area. I think he enjoyed the wild antics that took place in the testosterone filled kingdom…homemade zipline across the courtyard from the fourth floor anyone??</p>
<p>Little did he know that he was living history. The dorm is closed for renovations/expansion this yr. and will re-open in 2010 as a co-ed dorm. So S2 lived in the last all male dorm in it’s last yr. of it’s existence in it’s original state. I guess the demand for single sex dorms is pretty low. His sch. is predom. female. There are still two all female dorms.</p>
<p>I was pretty horrified at the idea of co-ed dorms. We only have daughters…so…I thought it would be really wierd. One of my requirements was that D only apply to schools with single sex dorm availability, and, wouldn’t you know it, H found the ‘perfect’ school for her…which she loved immediately…of course. AND she is in co-ed housing and it’s been just terrific. The guys have been great and when she and roommate were sick, they brought soup and ginger ale, and they always make sure the girls have walks to and from the library late at night. I’ve been just shocked by how really fantastic these boys have all turned out to be. So, live and learn. Obviously there are a lot of moms and dads out there doing a really great job with the young men.</p>
<p>The journal’s policies say they use a statistical reviewer “when appropriate” - I am sceptical but pledge to read the full article before I comment - we can criticize Yahoo for its summary, but perhaps the article itself contains the caveats we are easily coming up with. It seems premature to criticize the journal, the article, or the authors. (We could probably design a great experiment that would test the hypothesis of interest, but it would be pretty hard to conduct the study!)</p>
<p>[Heldref</a> Publications - Journal of American College Health](<a href=“http://www.heldref.org/pubs/jach/manuscripts.html]Heldref”>http://www.heldref.org/pubs/jach/manuscripts.html)</p>
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<p>But that’s irrelevant. Competent researchers either report the results of valid studies, or they report nothing. “Well it would be really hard to do a good study,” is not an excuse for reporting a bogus one. Why is a study with such a dramatic result not reported in a more high-profile journal?</p>
<p>On edit: Whatever problems there might be with this study, sample size is not one. The sample size looks fine, particularly when the differences in drinking turn out to be so enormous. Moreoever, “binge drinking” has a standard definition among researchers, so again, unless the researchers used some idiosyncratic definition, which is unlikely, the definition of “binge drinking” is not a problem with the study.</p>
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<p>Because the methodology is flawed. As it is, this one is a headline grabber with no real statistical merit. Just because it says something dramatic doesn’t mean it’s validity is supported despite how well it might sell copies.</p>
<p>Having read the article about the paper, but not the paper itself, I can’t conclude the methodology is flawed. I think it likely the methodology is flawed-- there are a lot of statistical minefields in a study like that, and social scientists tend not to be able to navigate through them-- but I don’t know it’s flawed, and I don’t know how anyone else could know without having read the paper. </p>
<p>I want to see the cross-tabs.</p>
<p>I’m not sure about this particular story, but the article on Drudge today, summarizing the new CDC study on sexually transmitted diseases, sure gave me pause:</p>
<p>“Overall, CDC estimates that 19 million new sexually transmitted infections occur each year, ALMOST HALF AMONG !5-24 YEAR OLDS.”</p>
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<p>Back in the day, it was understood that you didn’t become romantically involved with someone on your floor. At least not until you moved out the following year.</p>
<p>uhhh SlitheyTove it was a joke about how co-ed dorms could actually increase religious fervor.</p>
<p>And Cardinal Fang I disagree w/ you about sample size not being a problem here. Surveying 500 students on 5 campus tells you nothing substantive about the thousands of students living on the 3000 plus campuses nation wide.</p>
<p>Agree that it would be nice to know how those students and those campuses were chosen to know how flawed the study was but social research has rules about reporting what is statistically significant. Unless I forgetting something pretty major here; You can not responsibly extrapolate and generalize findings about the tens of thousands of students living the co-ed dorm life when so few were included in the study. All this study does is perhaps tell you something about the schools in which the study took place and 500 of the students who attend them.</p>
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<p>Believe it. Just search cc over the summer months to find all of the kids who were matched to a dorm that they did not request: sub-free, single sex, etc. The housing lottery is not a exact science.</p>
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At D’s college, such was referred to as housecest [dormcest]. The largest house had about 100 students, which magnifies the problem.</p>
<p>The change this study reports is enormous. Going from 42% binge drinking in the coed dorms to 18% binge drinking in the single-sex dorms? You don’t need a big sample size for that to be statistically significant. 500 students would be ample. The sample size is fine. And as for whether the results at these five campuses are applicable to other college campuses-- again, the reported change is so big that if the results are correct, there will be a big effect at other campuses too.</p>
<p>However, one mystery is why the researchers only got 500 students. The five colleges surely have many more students than that. Are the 500 students a good random sampling of the student bodies at these schools? At least at the four non-religious schools, most dorms are mixed sex, so how many single-sex dorm residents were polled from those schools? The sample size is fine, but the sample composition might not be.</p>
<p>Doing an objective study on this subject is close to impossible. To do it properly, you would need to randomly assign kids to single sex and coed dorms at the some college and report those findings. If it is by request, that brings in another factor.</p>
<p>There are coed dorms, and then there are truly coed dorms. My son’s dorm is coed, but the girls’ rooms are clustered at one end of the hall, with the boys on the other. That is a whole different story from having the rooms randomly assigned for males or females. Also the bathrooms are single sex at his college. </p>
<p>I was in an all girls’ dorm in college, but the ways the dorms were configured, it was not difficult to go from the boys’ houses to our part of the dorms. They were all connected and no one policed them. I liked having an all girls area, would hate to have to share bathroom facilities with a bunch of guys, but like the fact that female zone was not cordoned off limits to guys. There are some dorms out there that are too coed for my comfort these days.</p>
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<p>Okay. But in that case, are they also looking at people in co-ed dorms who did not end up in the dorm they requested? Did they have an even distribution across all of the dorms at the campuses? Because otherwise, there once again might be selection bias – at many schools, there are some dorms that are known to be bigger party dorms than others.</p>
<p>The problem with the sample size, in my opinion, is not with the number of students, but with the mix of colleges. How many of the students go to that one religious college in the mix? How many of the single-sex dorms are at that one religious college? Do you think coed vs. single-sex dorms have anything to do with differences in binge drinking between Bob Jones University and the University of South Carolina?</p>
<p>i can’t wait until i’m living in a building with guys <em>hopefully</em>, next year ;)</p>
<p><em>happy sigh</em> : )</p>