@djsmith90
Recovering Evolutionary Anthropologist/Accidental Epidemiologist/Cat fosterer PostDoc at Aarhus and Senior Research Associate at Bristol Interests: cooperation; religion; causal inference; cohort studies Site: https://danmajor-smith.netlify.app/about
"Modeling Uncertainty around Free-list Cultural Salience Scores" by @rcc-au.bsky.social's @djsmith90.bsky.social and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social OnlineFirst up now at Field Methods journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #AnthroTools #quantethnography
Double whammy just out with RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social Longitudinal projects and causal inference!
Religion and trauma: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Climate change concern and mental health: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
I am devastated because our cat Trasno is critically ill and needs urgent treatment to survive, but it’s financially overwhelming. If we’ve ever made you smile or feel supported, please consider sharing or contributing: gofundme.com/f/help-save-...
Thank you from the heart,
Alba
Our experience at @pci-regreports.bsky.social was great - Really helpful and collaborative reviews and editors, made for a refreshing change from the usual grind of the academic review/publishing process!
If any folks are PCI-curious, would totally recommend! 😊
Caveat 2) We measured climate *concern*, not climate *anxiety*. It's possible that reactions to the climate crisis which are more extreme than mere 'concern' have an impact on mental health - We simply can't infer anything about this from our paper
Many caveats though (ofc!)
1) Just because we *tried* to estimate a causal effect, doesn't mean we *succeed*. Our causal estimand was our target, but our aim may have been terrible, but we at least tried to be open about these issues (unmeasured confounding, selection bias, measurement error, etc.)
What did we find? Pretty much nada!
In this UK population of young adults (~30 years old) there was essentially no relationship between climate concern and subsequent mental health/well-being
Using the wonderful longitudinal ALSPAC data, we tried to answer whether concern over climate change causes subsequent mental health.
Lots of previous work has looked at climate anxiety/concern and mental health, but most is X-sectional, so is almost impossible to learn anything about causality
The world may be a burning shit-storm, but we're trying to do our little bit to make science slightly better - Our new Registered Report on climate concern and mental health was just recommended/accepted at @pci-regreports.bsky.social
doi.org/10.24072/pci...
📣 New paper by myself @djsmith90.bsky.social and colleagues published today in @royalsociety.org Proc B 📣
Grandmothers are often seen as key carers, but this isn’t always the case.
We explore why in Agta forgers reflecting on the implications of demography for evolution of grandmothering 👵🌍
AnthroTools 2.0 is live! Nine new functions that propagate, plot, and summarize uncertainty around item and cultural salience values. @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social @rcc-au.bsky.social
Can religious beliefs shape peoples' attitudes and behaviours regarding climate change?
We explored this using data from a large-scale UK cohort study (ALSPAC)
In short: Perhaps, but it's complicated. Answer depends on generation, religiosity measure and climate question
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
As a side note, even if you don't give a hoot about free-list data, check out the paper for the sweet use of LaTeX - Looks pretty legit, right? (What are we paying journals the big bucks for again...?)
The paper includes code to play around with these different methods, with more juicy deets and extras in the companion code: github.com/djsmith-90/F...
(We'll also be updating the @anthrotools.bsky.social package with these methods, so stay tuned!)
We focus on salience scores, starting simple with bootstrapping methods, followed by more principled/bad-ass Bayesian ZOIB and ordered Beta models (they sound scary, but are super-cool).
This approach can be also applied to other free-list metrics as well (Jaccard's similarity, cultural FST, etc).
Are you into free-list methods and want to incorporate uncertainty into your group-level estimates (eg Smith's S)?
Of course you do!
Then @bgpurzycki.bsky.social and I have a new preprint for your delectation!
doi.org/10.31219/osf...
No clear co-causal evidence of religion and mental health! Hot off the digital press from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social!
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
New blog post!
Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly.
So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost.
www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...
1/ 🧵 New preprint out today 🤩
With @djsmith90.bsky.social and co we have done deep-dive into grandmothering in the Agta to unpick the role of demography in shaping the role of grandmothers in direct childcare 👇🧪🏺
#Grandmothering #demography #BioAnth #EvPsych
📢 The final CCE seminar of 2024 is coming up soon with @djsmith90.bsky.social leading us into the 🎄 festive 🎄season with a presentation on
*Religion and mental health: a causal Christmas carol* 🎅
📆 18th Dec 2024 - 12:45 in person start with food, 13:00 online talk start
🔓Open to all
Did not expect my first inclusion in a starter pack to be "people named Dan Smith with PhDs"! 😅
Still, at least you now know where to find us!
I found @djsmith90.bsky.social's figure about ethical publishing so helpful for students I added it to my guide to academic reading/writing/publishing (osf.io/p37zj)
Yeah, I'd reckon probably somewhere around there, or a bit to the left with the 'society' journals - technically AAAS is non-profit, and it doesn't act as much like a commercial publisher than CUP and OUP.
Ace, thanks Pat!
And very cool (I mean, depressing as hell, but still very cool) - Thanks for sharing 😅
Alas, I agree with @drbeth.bsky.social that it's still super-common (eg, anecdotes about hiring decisions made on having a Nature/Science/Whatever paper)... Hopefully will start changing more soon though! 🤞
V. interested to know what you find if you do a deep-dive into this 🙂
A lot has been written about this recently, but I think it's still useful to remind ourselves just how warped and unfair the academic publishing system is
The blog goes through:
- How the system is unfair
- How it got that way
- What we can do to (try and) change it
Hope it's of some use! 🙂
New blog post I cobbled together for the Bristol Reproducibility Network
Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful
openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/09/23/e...
Tak! Excited to start working with all the wonderful @rcc-au.bsky.social folk in Aarhus too! 🙂
As researchers we definitely still need to consider the impact of selection bias in our work, but hopefully this paper can help provide a bit more understanding about selection bias and some context for how selection might bias our results.
END/
Does this mean we can all get on with our lives and safely ignore selection bias?
Of course not!
Different studies have different patterns and strengths of selection which could realistically result in waaaay more bias (eg, recruitment into UKBioBank: doi.org/10.1093/ije/...).