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I did watch enough of this video to get a couple of conclusions from it. Gershoff, who is the “author” of this mentions once about criticisms of one of her just-prior works as including physical abuse (hitting, objects, etc.) so she went back and supposedly concentrated on just ‘spanking’ as the study focus.

Yet, in doing this both she and the host keep constantly citing the fear that ‘spanking’ can/would grow into abuse and she even cited reviews of studies that concentrated on “spanking AND abuse” largely within same sample families. Additionally, they keep mentioning this “the data show....” a lot but assume the conclusions they draw from “the data” are as well known and as “settled-science” as Global Warming. Which brings me to my second conclusion based on the interview part that I did see.

She (Gershoff) explains in a wonderful cacophony of development mumbo jumbo about her “meta-analysis” and how this (by her implication) shows the conclusion of the study must/might be irrefutable.

What her “meta-analysis” apparently consisted of (my interpretation by her statements) was a review/study of 50 years of prior “studies” by others about “spanking.” At the point I stopped there had been no mention of validity or faults recognized or evaluated in the study study-set, nor any specificity of results - largely just generalized conclusions that agreed with the thesis of her latest study.

Somehow, HER study is valid because she statistically evaluated all these ‘studies’ and came up with a result that is “scientific” because because of her methodology. Yet, she had earlier admitted she did this study (in part) because of criticisms of her earlier study (I’d guess it was ‘meta-analyzed’ also) so she went back and filtered some more.

This trend by academics to legitimize data under the guise of objective scientific analysis (and therefore indisputable) is a pretty common way to try hide preconceived subjective conclusions going into the study.

From my own personal viewpoint, I believe this is the same kind of pre-conceived scholarship by Michael Mann of PSU, James Hansen at NASA, and Phil Jones at EA CRU under the guise of “science” and “data.” In the end, it is the study’s Principal Investigators who get to choose (cherry pick?) what data and how much gets used to fit the goal of the “study.”