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April 17, 2006

From the country that gave us Sherlock Holmes...

A startling result of research from Scotland, where last year, a research project proved knives were most likely to be used in stabbing homicides, comes this gem of research knowledge:

Goth Youths Prone to Suicide Attempts and Self-Mutilation

Not that I'm entirely surprised with that result, but there are some little problems, which the researchers are honest enough to point out:

"But since our study found that more reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a Goth, this suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the Goth subculture."

So its not actually Goths, then.

The report details statistics for such sub-cultural identifications as "Goth, Punk, Heavy Metal, Mosher, Nu-metal, Skater, Grunge, Retro, Indie, Rave, Club, Garage, Hip-Hop, Pop and Other". Skinhead, Breakers, Mods and Hippies were excluded on the basis that there were ten or less people that identified with the genra and no one likes them anyway. (Coke even declared open season on hippies by proxy, with their new Mountain Dew clone, Vault)

"However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results."

It was, in fact "A School and community based study of young people living in the Central Clydeside Conurbation, Scotland", based on 1258 young people. They found 15 goths in total. Admittedly, it has been a few years since I last delved into degrees of confidence, chi-squares and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, but most statistical significance tests rely on a decent sized random sample, so a sample from one age group in a single location would not seem ideal.

There's also the everpresent jab at role playing games (inserted by MedPage reporters, and not in the research paper):

There is a Goth subculture in the U.S., reportedly inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragon(sic).

Further evidence of such demonic perversions inherent in Dungeons and Dragons is provided here.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at April 17, 2006 10:43 AM

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