Reposted by Álvaro Padilla Pozo
How do people decide how many children to have and when to stop? It's complicated!
Lots of sociologists/demographers in this piece, including yours truly & @srhayford.bsky.social.
theatlantic.com
She Wanted to Have Three Kids. Then Life Happened.
Many women start out with a notion of their ideal number of children—but a variety of obstacles can get in the way.
![What can be learned when multiple analysts arrive at different estimates
Kowall et al. (2025) have brought the multi-analyst approach to epidemiology, with instructive results. With this approach, multiple researchers analyze the same data set to answer the same research question. Or, at least, what appears to be the same research question. In fact, the very first paper that popularized this approach [1] has been criticized for using a vague research question (“Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with dark skin tone than light skin tone?”), which apparently led the analysts to try to answer quite different questions—from a simple question about a bivariate statistical association to much more complex causal questions about racial bias [2].
In contrast, the research question passed on to analysts in Kowall et al. (2025) seems less ambiguous: Does marital status influence the incidence of cardiovascular disease? But less ambiguous does not equal unambiguous. Considerable...](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:gz53felr7btxgmbxae5aooxi/bafkreidvs4c7wvoh63tr2ptmvnnl5hya246ofttwyzlvotkmqhnpwgbf4a)
