“More bad science from JAMA”

In an abstract entitled, “Statistical dust and sweeping claims about maternal warmth,” John Richters and Everett Waters write: Alley and colleagues draw on mediation analyses of longitudinal data from Millennium Cohort Study to argue that their findings “highlight the critically important role that childhood maternal warmth plays in shaping mental and physical health into late adolescence” (p. 716), and “suggest public health interventions aimed at increasing maternal warmth “may be particularly effective in positively impacting adolescent health” (p. 714). Although the article is dense with tabularized information about key study variables, readers will search in vain for evidence to justify the authors’ conclusions and recommendations related to maternal warmth. What they will find instead are minuscule direct and mediated path coefficients (betas) linking maternal warmth to adolescent outcomes that amount to uninterpretable and unactionable statistical dust. The authors tell us as…