On Balance, Spanking is Detrimental

So, who wins this debate will be decided based on who best met their burden of proof. When finished reading, voters should ask themselves: "who did a better job of proving what they set out to prove?" PRO's last stand: I. No, not all the studies presented so far are purely correlational cross-sectional studies. I quoted Gershoff singling these out earlier, so PRO really can't pretend I'm including the other longitudinal studies in my R3 critique of "simple correlations". PRO cited (a minority) of longitudinal studies, while my affirmative argument relied on them pretty much exclusively. That also means that my point about bean-counting studies with radically different methodologies being stupid still holds, so voters can extend that too. The point was that purely correlational studies aren't . Remember: I asked PRO to explain how much weight we should give pure correlations alone in the last round and why. He didn't do this, and now he can't. For that reason alone voters can extend my criticism of the simple correlation studies (read: the vast majority of PRO's case). II. PRO insists the confounders (self-selection bias) aren't compelling, so there's little reason to doubt his simple correlations...even though his sources (Gershoff) say they do...so I'm not really sure what else to say here. He's basically dropped my points and I pointed this out in the last round, but PRO doesn't seem to have noticed, because he didn't respond to that at all. So, voters can extend that too. III. I never said cross-sectional studies are better than longitudinal ones. I said the opposite. Most of PRO's case consists of cross-sectional studies, so this actually makes my point. IV. Obviously, if your studies don't define a key variable consistently, it doesn't make sense to analyze them as if they're always talking about the same thing. PRO doesn't really explain why my reasoning is wrong here, he just says the BOP is on me (it's not, I already explained why this mattes), doesn't explain why, and basically pleads the voter to assume his other studies' flaws can't affect the analysis's results. Also, getting hit on the head is more physically and psychologically severe than being hit on the behind, even if the strikes are comparably strong. If PRO or any voter doubts this, they should try it themselves. Bottom line: Yes, the difference between that and spanking matters. No, they're not the same thing. V. The only thing PRO gets right is that his first 3 links only point to two studies, not three. He's also right that they were included in my other metas -- this isn't really a concession, though, because the metas conclusion agrees with me. PRO can say that his isolated studies support him, but that would be cherrypicking, since he'd have to ignore a wider review of studies with the same methodology that came to the opposite conclusion. Also, the confounders adjusted for were specified repeatedly in R2 and R3. Extend pretty much my entire negation of PRO. PRO's flimsy attacks I. The point isn't that studies didn't find as significant an association with bad effects. It's that they found an association, significant even if lesser, when using the simplistic methodology PRO cheerleads. PRO can't handwave that implication away, soooo extend. II. The confounder in child psychotherapy is self-selection bias. Read: Comparing spanked to non-spanked isn't informative, because non-spanked children are way less likely to exhibit relevant antisocial behavior in the first place. Given that PRO's main meta notes this near the conclusion, an excerpt that I clearly quoted in R2, where I also explained that this was the specific confounder being adjusted for by Ferguson (see end of section I) there's really no excuse for missing this. Extend. III. So, the first problem is that I did explain how the methodologies were different. I. I also pointed to an entire source that described how, specifically, the Larzelere meta was methodologically notable. So, PRO's totally wrong right off the bat. The other problem is that being unable to read the fulltext is an absurd reason to dismiss a source. It might be reasonable if we had no other way of figuring out how the studies differ in important ways, which clearly isn't the case with my metas anyway. So, barring such circumstances, PRO's already behaving arbitrarily. To demonstrate this, just look at the studies his metas cite: How many of them have an easily accessible fulltext? Gershoff cites over 80 papers. Did PRO look at every single one before assuming their inclusion in the meta was okay? No, but we don't have a reason to care either; which shows my metas would be fine too. There can be reasons where this is a real problem, but they don't apply right now. By the way, both my metas are easily accessible on popular paywall-bypassing websites like sci-hub.tw or libgen.io. So even if we forget about everything else that's wrong with PRO's point here, it's still false. Since that addresses all criticisms of my affirmative case, voters can extend it entirely. Remember: In real-world terms, my metas prove that spanking is, at worst, of neutral effect, and at best, a good thing. The only hope for PRO was that his affirmative is soundly proven, and that its impact outweighs mine. Bottom line: I met my BOP, PRO didn't. Viva CON! Sources and links: (1 - 9 see previous rounds)