A better question would be, why would you do an online survey of only black men, if your goal is understand "the unique challenges of brain health and cognitive decline faced by Black men"? Surely you would want to leave it open to at least white and hispanic men too, to at least try and see if those challenges are in fact 'unique' and have some sort of baseline or comparison? And it was an online survey of self-reported measures recruited by an existing survey service (CloudResearch), so they were not limited to an existing sample of only black men - they went out of their way to restrict the sample.
It's an analysis of cognitive decline from "active coping and grit". The study is being done exclusively on a black cohort, it appears from their Background, because these studies have already been done on white cohorts and they have the data available already to do the comparisons. I'm not a scientist, feel free to correct me, someone, if I'm misreading this.
Is the use of the data appropriate/applicable to what the linked article is suggesting? Probably not.
gwern•8mo ago
I did skim it, but it didn't help me much, because I didn't see any comparison to the supposed other cohorts, and even if they had done those, an online convenience sample is almost certainly going to differ a lot in many ways from whatever other white cohort you used from a different study, whereas you could've simply recruited white participants from the same service and gotten an obviously much more valid comparison group.
kbrkbr•8mo ago
Assuming that you did not want to make the simple statement that their meanings or referents are different (because people usually don't doubt that), I can give you a counter example:
With all the studies finding correlation between smoking and lung cancer it indeed turned out that correlation was in fact causation.
mathgradthrow•8mo ago
netsharc•8mo ago
gwern•8mo ago
spcebar•8mo ago
It's an analysis of cognitive decline from "active coping and grit". The study is being done exclusively on a black cohort, it appears from their Background, because these studies have already been done on white cohorts and they have the data available already to do the comparisons. I'm not a scientist, feel free to correct me, someone, if I'm misreading this.
Is the use of the data appropriate/applicable to what the linked article is suggesting? Probably not.
gwern•8mo ago
kbrkbr•8mo ago
With all the studies finding correlation between smoking and lung cancer it indeed turned out that correlation was in fact causation.
mathgradthrow•8mo ago