Someone save us all from BYU and the MSM

[Morkilus]

@"The Salt Lake Tribune

Jensen’s research broke new ground by investigating correlations with quality of interpersonal relationships, “risky behavior” and self-perception. His team found regular gamers were three times more likely to smoke marijuana than those who never play games and women who play are more likely to have a negative image of themselves.
“I was a little surprised the video games’ effects were consistently negative,” Walker said. “But there were no hugely strong effects. I was surprised that we could find no positive correlations, like for video games that you play as a group.”
The research tapped existing data generated by Project READY, a massive survey database of college students designed by Walker and other BYU professors. The research team examined survey answers by 813 students from six universities.

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11564716?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com

The fact that they’d give this guy an article is infuriating. These are the sort of articles still published in the mainstream newspapers - and I had so much hope after Fallout 3 was featured in the New York Times art section. I know this is just some useless social science datamining project, but how are these at all scientific without controls and experiments? How do you get around the chicken-and-egg dilemma, for one?

[RSofaer]

How could he say that there are no positive correlations when he said that gamers are three times more likely to smoke pot in the previous sentence?

[PeterGinsberg]

Well, they finally proved it: smoking pot causes you to play video games.