You may recall the media frenzy from a few weeks ago surrounding a recent study on Fatherhood & Testosterone – the NY Times covered it, MSNBC covered it, and countless other media sources across the U.S. Did testosterone levels really drop in new fathers? It was an interesting topic of conversation among bloggers, parents, and certainly the dads within our diverse and caring community of fathers. With most research findings, you might take it with a grain of salt because so much is unknown about the sample data or the conditions of the study. That surely includes this study as well – it was done on Filipino men, not dads in the U.S. Either way, we like our readers to hear all sides of a story…so here we get to hear from the lead author in the research study, Lee Gettler, as he shares his perspective walking us through the findings, their implications, and some of the logic he used in interpreting them.
Dear Lance,
I am the lead author on the PNAS research article published a few weeks ago that showed fatherhood caused testosterone to decline in a large group of men. Because of all the media coverage on the article and because we wanted to have a chance to elaborate on our discussion of the findings for the public, we wrote a guest blog at Scientific American, which went online today.
We hope that this contribution might be useful and interesting to the membership of the NYC Dads Group. If you wouldn’t mind taking a look at the entry and posting it to your group’s webpage, we would greatly appreciate it. We are really trying to spread the word about this to parents.
Read the complete post here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/10/05/fatherhood-childcare-and-testosterone-study-authors-discuss-the-details/
Sincerely,
Lee T. Gettler
Doctoral candidate
Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University
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From the article, as per why they used a sample in the Phillipines:
“The caregiving duties that fathers in our study reported most commonly will likely sound familiar to many fathers who read this blog: watching TV, feeding and bathing, playing games, and taking their children on walks. Thus, we predict that the findings that we report for this population will be broadly-applicable to other global populations with similar models of paternal involvement..”
The “prediction” that this will be “broadly-applicable” would be better called a guess. The sample reflects what happens in Cebu, in the Phillipines. Does the projection control for hormonal affects of diet elsewhere, when projecting elsewhere? Did the projections control for age, comparing it to parenting ages elsewhere? Did it control for melatonin levels? Shaving frequency? Sun Exposure? Car usage? I can go on. The sample is NOT projectable.
This study can be used to reflect the sample chosen — ie. “The men in this study live in urban and rural neighborhoods in the metropolitan area surrounding Cebu City” — and only those men.