More Research Needs to Be Done Before Anyone Can Associate
Increased Family Life Satisfaction with Higher Education Levels
Across the Sexes
A crowd of college graduates at their commencement ceremony. The
crowd is full of mixed feelings. Good Free Photos from
Unsplash.com.
By Brynne Adamson
Nov. 29, 2018
Many Americans want to know if attending college helps in
providing equal family life satisfaction across the sexes. However,
a new study found no significance in its results, meaning more
research is required on the subject.
College is a part of everyone’s life, whether they like it or
not. Parents pay for their kids to go to college, high school
graduates must decide which college they would like to attend,
children have siblings who leave to live on their own, grandparents
decide for themselves to go back to school, entire communities are
affected by having a college campus just a few blocks down… Even if
you haven’t gone to college, someone in your neighborhood has.
Thus, studies about college and the effects of higher education are
highly important.
A newfound study was conducted by researchers Nicole Baldwin and
Micayla Houghton at Utah State University these past couple of
months. The researchers had wanted to know if there was an
association between one’s education level and level of family life
satisfaction. They also wanted to know if one’s family life
satisfaction differed among males and females.
Baldwin and Houghton used a study that had been published by the
Pew Research Center in 2014, called “The Rising Cost of Not Going
to College” 1; Pew interviewed a sample of 2,002 Americans, 18
years or older, over the phone for this study. Baldwin and Houghton
isolated questions from the Pew survey that dealt with their
study’s focus and conducted Chi-Square Tests to their findings.
However, they found their results weren’t significant at the .05
level.
“At first, it was really disappointing, you know? We had gone
through all that work just to find that we couldn’t really apply
our results to the world. We know now, though, that other
researchers could use our method of research to further their
future projects. And that’s pretty cool,” Nicole Baldwin said.
For research to be deemed significant, p, or the p-value, must
be less than .05. This is because the p-value is the probability of
getting a result randomly or by chance. For example, if p=.033,
that means that around 3% (or 3 times out of 100) of the results
one is getting is by chance2. The less amount of chance one has in
their results, the more applicable and significant the results are
to the rest of the population of the study.
For Baldwin and Houghton’s first conducted Chi-Square Test, they
used a crosstabulation between the respondents’ level of
satisfaction with their family life and their level of education.
This test resulted in a value of 23.009, with their degrees of
freedom being 15 and their p-value being .084. Their second test,
which was a crosstabulation between the respondents’ sex and their
level of satisfaction with their family life, they got a value of
3.398, their degrees of freedom was 3, and their p-value was .334.
Each of these tests used results from the survey the Pew Research
Center conducted.
Because .084 and .334 are both over .05 for the p-value, the
study could not be deemed significant.
“Although I really wish we had found something significant from
our tests, I’m glad that we conducted the study. The results were
very different than what we expected,” Micayla Houghton said on the
matter.
Another study, which was published last year, had a similar
focus as Baldwin and Houghton’s study. However, this study did find
significant results that can be applied to the general population
of America. By Mikael Nordenmark and called “The Importance of Job
and Family Satisfaction for Happiness among Women and Men in
Different Gender Regimes,” 3 this study used data from the
International Social Survey Program (ISSP) to draw conclusions for
22 countries across the globe.
In this study, Nordenmark found there were no gender differences
when it came to level of happiness for non-conservative countries,
like the United States. However, he did find that the more years of
schooling one has, the higher one’s level of happiness is, across
both genders.
Although, just because one study found that attending college
helps in providing equal family life satisfaction across the sexes
does not mean the study should be used as an answer to the question
overall. Multiple studies would need to be conducted to provide a
more definite answer. Future researchers could and should use the
previously mentioned studies, by Nordenmark or Baldwin and
Houghton, to further their research.
Sources:
[1] Pew Research Center. (2014, December 22). Education: The
Rising Cost
of Not Going to College. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost-of-not-
going-to-college/
[2] JDPerezgonzalez. (n.d.). Fisher’s Significane Testing.
Retrieved November 23,
2018, from
http://wikiofscience.wikidot.com/technology1:fisher-test-
Significance
[3] Nordenmark, M. (2017). The Importance of Job and Family
Satisfaction for
Happiness among Women and Men in Different Gender Regimes.
Societies, 8, 1, 1-10. doi:10.3390/soc8010001
