Correlation and causality are 2 different concepts often mixed up, look at this chart made by BusinessWeek to understand the difference:
This research by a good friend of mine Tom ter Bogt and his colleagues can be understood in a wrong way. They describe a prediction of criminal behavior based on musical preferences. So does listening to Jazz-music make you at age 12 a lesser juvenile delinquent at age 16? No, but there is a chance this will be the case. There can be many reasons why this correlation exists.
Don’t get me wrong, the article does suggest that there is a possible causality: ‘Music is the medium that separates mainstream youth from young people who may more easily adopt norm-breaking behaviors. In peer groups characterized by their deviant music taste, norm-breaking youth may “infect” their friends with their behaviors.’ But they acknowledge of course that this research hasn’t proven this. And still if there is a causality (which we don’t know for sure), then do remember that this research has not found a perfect correlation between musical preferences and delinquency. (If you wonder, yes I did listen to rock music, but also to blues and jazz)
Abstract of the paper that can be downloaded here:
OBJECTIVES: To test Music Marker Theory (MMT) positing that early adolescents’ preferences for nonmainstream types of popular music indicate concurrent and later minor delinquency.
METHODS: MMT was tested in a 4-year longitudinal study (n = 309).
RESULTS: The results showed that early fans of different types of rock (eg, rock, heavy metal, gothic, punk), African American music (rhythm and blues, hip-hop), and electronic dance music (trance, techno/hardhouse) showed elevated minor delinquency concurrently and longitudinally. Preferring conventional pop (chart pop) or highbrow music (classic music, jazz), in contrast, was not related to or was negatively related to minor delinquency.
CONCLUSIONS: Early music preferences emerged as more powerful indicators of later delinquency rather than early delinquency, indicating that music choice is a strong marker of later problem behavior. The mechanisms through which music preferences are linked to minor delinquency are discussed within the framework of MMT.
indeed, not a perfect correlation. Not even close. Correlations are around .20, which means that about only 3-4% of behavior may be predicted.
Another limitation: criminal behavior was self-reported (and on just a 4 point scale, which actually doesnt allow correlations). So basically, they only showed that people listening to gangsta rap *say* more often (4%) that they committed small crime…
So, maybe, it can even be a case of a kind of socially desirable bias or giving themselves an attitude?
Indeed, it probably is. And it works both ways. Either the rebels are tempted to report a casual bike theft (even when not true), to be cool. Or the good (top 40 music) girls, who perhaps also stole a bike will be less likely to admit that to the interviewer.
So, self-reports are a problem in this particular research question
And the scale is also ridiculous. It is a nominal scale with four points: never, sometimes, … On such scales, you really can’t do correlations. If a Master thesis contains such analyses, I am tempted to score ‘fail’.
I wouldn’t have accepted this paper as a reviewer…
[…] de BBC over het Mozart-effect, als er al effect is, dan is het kort en ongeacht de muziekstijl, dus ook door hard-rock waar je trouwens geen crimineel van wordt. Echt […]
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[…] Everyday new research papers are being published and sometimes they get some media coverage. A very few researches get a lot of attention but than things can go wrong, take for example the research that described a link between music and violence. […]