Reply to Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)

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Reply to "Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele]These folks apparently spent 4 years studying DCUM and never contacted me once. I think they made fundamental errors in their analysis. I strongly reject their primary conclusion. I also suspect that their scraping of the site may be behind some of the strange performance issues we have occasionally had. [/quote]

They never contacted you at all? That's pretty remarkably bad research. There is so much missing. Just the number of post and thread deletions at a minimum would impact this kind of analysis, and you could offer insight.

How disappointing. I hate shoddy research![/quote]

One correction. The authors did contact me once with the following message (I've omitted names):

[quote]To Whom It May Concern,

In order to study the interests of parents of school-aged children in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, xxxxx, would like to record for research purposes the text of a selection of postings on http://www.dcurbanmom.com/. This research would be conducted using a technique called “web scraping” whereby an automated program reads the source code behind a web page, extracts the text of forum posts, and stores those pieces of information in an offline file. The text of these posts will not be associated with specific usernames in the downloaded copy, and will be used for research purposes only. Research results will only be reported in the aggregate, and the full texts of the posts will not be shared. In accordance with your site’s policies, we would like to secure your permission to undertake this project. The goal of this research is to provide policy recommendations which will better address the interests of the parents of school-aged children in the DC metro area.
[/quote]

I gave them permission to do this (I note that they did publish the full text of a few messages in their study contrary to their commitment, but I don't care about that). Also, I had no idea that they would download every single post in the forum. I would not have agreed to that.

I didn't know that the study had been published until I saw a tweet about it today. I'm in a discussion on Twitter with a Professor who is arguing that their would be no benefit in talking to me about it. I pointed out that there is significant interest in Deal and Wilson among black families. Are those families choosing segregation? Just suggest removing Shepherd from the Deal and Wilson boundaries and see what kind of hornets nest you find yourself in. That would really increase their word count, but is that favoring segregation?

Parents attempt to find the best educational opportunities for their children within the parameters created by their specific social-economic situations. An interesting discussion would be about what characteristics are considered "the best". If you made a list of several factors, I concede that "racial segregation" might be on the list and one chosen by some users, but I do not think that it would be a consideration of the majority of our users. To the contrary, I fully believe that racial diversity is generally seen a strength of charter schools and one of the factors that has made several charters among the most popular of the DCUM community.

[/quote]

Wow. That's pretty horrific behavior. They scraped the whole site and stored it without permission, and also quoted direct posts in violation of a promise?

I don't know much about academic ethics standards, but that certainly seems overtly shady.[/quote]

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