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Critical Thinking on Contemporary Issues
serves to illustrate the idea that outcomes are often multidetermined and complicated.
We ask students whether it is reasonable to assume that divorce is the sole cause of all these
different outcomes or if some of them might occur in individuals who are from nondivorced
homes. Their writing assignment requires them to review several different papers on the
effects of divorce and describe whether any of the data are actually causal.
The Taking Sides issue of video games and violence (Issue #16) provides another engag-
ing topic for practice. Gentile and Anderson (2006) produce correlational data that they
believe suggests that violent games cause violence in children; Olsen (2006) contends that
the data are not conclusive in terms of causation. Gentile and Anderson include a para-
graph in their paper discussing how developmental science is producing a body of work
that allows for causal conclusions despite the lack of experimental data. We have students
respond to that assertion in writing. These issues allow students to discuss the idea of
whether correlational data can ever “prove” causation, such as the data the American
Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) used when it declared in a 2000 joint statement with five
other medical groups that television violence causes aggression in children (AAP, 2000).
Issue #18, whether pornography is harmful, centers on the same argument that there is no
actual causal evidence that the use of pornography leads to rape. Both video games and
pornography are salient issues, drawing a great deal of student interest, and men in par-
ticular are motivated to believe that these are harmless pastimes, thus making for a lively
set of papers. For both topics, a key component of this assignment is to require the
PsycINFO search to cover both sides of the issue in order to prevent students from sub-
mitting only literature reviews that support their preexisting views.
Question #4: Are there Faulty Generalizations?
With this question, we progress from identifying and critiquing the sources of informa-
tion to introducing a more detailed analysis of both the source and the use of the infor-
mation. The objective is for students to learn to identify situations in which information
presented as fact is taken out of the context within which it was initially generated. In our
experience, students often have an initial bias that all research should apply to all people.
We would like to help them understand that research targeting a specific population is
valuable, but the conclusions then need to be limited to that population. This is a difficult
idea, so we bring back a familiar topic—Issue #8 (on divorce)—and revisit the idea that
Hetherington and Kelly’s (2006) and Wallerstein and Lewis’s (2006) findings are not
wrong, merely specific to their particular study populations. We move to Issue #7 and
consider the generalizability of the research on maternal employment in both papers. We
have them look at sample characteristics and determine to whom the results apply, revisit-
ing the idea that one author is writing about children and the other is writing about ado-
lescents. Again, not wrong, but different. The presentation of antidepressant use and
suicide (Issue #12) is particularly useful for identifying generalizations. An initial step is to
analyze the characteristics of the samples used for the referenced research and determine
to whom the results apply, pointing out the section in the Healy and Whitaker (2006)
paper referring to epidemiological studies. We then use this topic as a reference point for
teaching about “representative” samples, including discussion of the difference between a