This anti-daycare website seems to agree…
http://www.daycaresdontcare.org

In other words, regardless of how crap her questions were, did she get the right answers?

I guess the world will never know.

God forbid they should do what they want.

Well, yeah; I just figured that went without saying. Lesbians aren’t “women,” silly, they’re lesbians! [/snark]

I merely pointed out that several longitudinal studies of highly educated women have produced a similar result.

How else would ask someone about their future plans? A simple open ended question like this seems to be a good way to at least get a sense of the answer. That’s my $.02.

The problem is not the open-ended nature of the question. Instead, it lies with the assumption that whoever is answering the question intends to have children. Yes, that “when” should probably be an “if,” but more important than that are the hints at the underlying bias of the interviewer.

The survey instrument is flawed but that doesn’t mean the results are incorrect.

This is about the funniest justification I’ve seen so far.

I have to agree with Uncle Kvetch—my favorite question was, “what do you think the boys think about this?”

Beyond turning off all women who don’t structure their life choices around whether or not it appeals to men, the fact that she didn’t ask the boys is actually a huge failure from a social sciences perspective.

For all we know, there could have been a sea change in attitude at Yale, with everyone wanting to earn less money and have a lifestyle that included more time with the kids. That would have been a really interesting finding, with potentially large repercussions. I have no idea if that’s going on, or if something totally different is going on (maybe Yale grads all plan to adopt or live in communes or are all so wealthy they were all raised by nannies), and neither does she!

But everything in this “survey” was structured to fit into her already-written storyline: every woman (and no man) faces the same identical choice, and has only two options of how to deal with it.

That’s not research. That’s confirming your prejudices. This is such tripe, and it speaks poorly of the NYT that they’d put it on the front page.

Another obvious flaw in the questions is that they appear to make work vs stay home a one-time choice. It might have been much more useful to frame things as “How long do you intend to stay out of the work force?” with possible answers ranging from, say, three weeks to indefinite. I’d say someone who had gotten to be a reporter at the NYT should know better, but then we’d all have to laugh.

Is this generation different? Perhaps. But have yet to see any evidence to suggest that it is. And my own experience is that it is not. In fact, it makes perfect sense. Insofar as the majority of ivy league students come from fairly privaleged backgrounds, this could simply be a case of wealth effects dominating substitution effects….

There have even been a few articles in public opinion research journals suggesting low response rate doesn’t really change the answers much. The reason seems to be that in many cases response is a fairly idiosyncratic process.

As far as the questions go, they don’t seem so crazy:

“When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?”

How else would ask someone about their future plans? A simple open ended question like this seems to be a good way to at least get a sense of the answer. That’s my $.02.

Even that old Lisa Belkin NYT Magazine article was not as bad… although in that article, the interesting thing was to listen to Lisa Belkin trying to contort and twist her 30-something women who basically said “I really want to keep working and take care of my child too, but my boss wouldn’t let me” into “I don’t wanna work, I just wanna be a full-time mom.” These disappointingly unreflective Yale kids are actually saying the latter, which makes me think maybe the quotes are more carefully screened than Lisa Belkin’s were.